Revolutions in Verse: The Medium of Russian Modernism

Modernist poetry has long been synonymous with novelty. Yet the modernist canon cannot be reduced to a rejection of established norms. Equally significant are those places where modernist poets and theorists consciously engaged with formal convention. Returning to debates around and poetic encounters with three key aesthetic categories—rhythm, image, and voice—Revolutions in Verse contends that these moments point towards the more profound innovation of this period, its interest in the material bases of poetic speech. Through fresh readings of the work of a diverse group of modernist poets and formalist theorists (including Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Yury Tynianov, Viktor Shklovsky, and Boris Eikhenbaum), the study shows how the proliferation of interartistic experiment, on the one hand, and the emergence of new media technologies, on the other, made poetry visible to modernists as a medium in its own right. Reframing the complex elements of modernist poetics as products of communicative strategies developed in specific historical circumstances and taking seriously claims for the transformative potential of literature as a means of knowing and understanding the social world, Palmer offers a timely contribution to renewed discussions around modernism, the concept of literary form, and the value of literature and literary criticism more broadly.