Mandelstam's influence on my writing happens on several levels. He represents a figure of wholeness (Hebraic-Hellenic): a sort of psychopomp, as I've described in earlier posts here. Acmeism - the loose grouping of poets with which he was affiliated and whose poetics he helped define - emphasized, on the one hand, cultural continuity (M. once defined it as "longing for world culture"), and on the other hand, realism and craft - a celebration of this world as opposed to the other worlds of Symbolism.

But this "world culture" for Mandelstam was not, as some have assumed, rooted in traditionalism or conservatism. M's Acmeist "domestic hellenism" was a future-directed cultural norm, a kind of radiant humanism (see his "the gold coin of the future global humanism"). Poetry was rooted in this larger cultural continuity with Europe, with the ancient Mediterranean, and through them with the world at large.

I discovered that Mandelstam's world-view seemed to counterbalance some shortcomings in the great Moderns, Pound & Eliot & Williams & Stevens et al. All of them share points of affinity with Mandelstam and Acmeism, yet Pound's irascible fanaticism, Eliot's otherworldly pessimism & conservatism, the parochialism of some of the others, left me dissatisfied. Only Hart Crane (& Montale, & Joyce, & Proust) among those moderns, won as deep an assent - or as deep a sense of personal affinity - from me, as did Mandelstam. This sense of affinity had a lot to do with the approaches and trial runs I took in the late 80s and 90s around the long poem (or "poema", as they are called in Russia).

And in the mid-90s I was intrigued to discover that many of the Language poets had traveled to Russia about the same time I was discovering Mandelstam, and that their affinities lay more with the Russian Futurists of the early 20th century, and, among critics, the Russian Formalists, than with Acmeism. Futurism and Acmeism can be seen as dual, antithetical outgrowths from Symbolism. And it seemed curious to me that in the 2nd half of the 90s I was (at least in my own mind) replaying those rivalries (between acmeist continuity and postmodern futurism) in my debates with poets affiliated with Language Poetry and the NY School (in venues such as the Buffalo Poetics List).

I've written more about these things in a couple essays in Mudlark. I try to see my polemics as forming some sort of holistic world-view. The cultural continuity of Acmeism, I relate to the idea of a "tradition-at-large" within which oppositional, idiomatic styles subsist. And on a philosophical or spiritual level, I relate this tradition-at-large to what I see as the telos or purpose of poetry in general. In a philosophical sense, wholeness is the search for the Good, the whole of goodness or God - within which or whom all lesser, partial goods are absorbed. This is the ancient concept of philo-logos, the ordering principle of the wise or just person, Wisdom or Justice, which subsumes passion to the contemplation of the Good in itself, and seeks to reflect it in radiant good works.