A Patterned Acupuncture

Whenever one remembers or reads Mayakovsky, one is struck and convinced, apart from the social significance of his themes and the civic spirit of his verse, by the poet's passion and emotional intensity. "I'll yank out my soul for you, stamp on it so it'll be big! – and I'll give it to you all bloody like a flag!" The spiritual saturation of the verse with what has been experienced, words as blood, is perhaps the main thing for the poet. Mayakovsky has quite a few inspired poems about this, as do also, for that matter, his contemporaries – Esenin, Bagritskii, and Tikhonov…. "To be a poet…is to caress others' souls with the blood of feeling" are words justified by the life and death of their author. Yes, in speaking of the Mayakovskian traditions, we must also consider the experience of another poet, dialectically linked to him, that of Esenin. In him, too, the civic impulse is clear (it's enough to recall his narrative poems, The Song of the Great March [Pesn' o velikom pokhode], The Poem about 36 [Poema ...