Selected Poems

In this Selected Poems, published originally as The Twelve and Other Poems (1970) Jon Stallworthy and Peter France introduce a wide range of Blok's poetry into English, retaining as much as possible his distinctive form and tone. His early poetry is inspired by mystical experiences, and the Beautiful Lady in his work is less a conceit than a powerful enabler. When history filled the sky with smoke and put out the stars, this mysticism did not abandon him. It makes delicate the difficult 'political' poems of his maturity and tempers his disaffection.
'The Twelve' has claims to being the first great poem of the Russian Revolution. It remains enigmatic, the language elevated, the tone celebratory, even mystical in some respects. No wonder that Mayakovsky, bringing Revolution into the very language and form of his poetry, wrote against Blok and the old forms, answering 'Thetwelve' itself with '150,000,000'. Trotsky wrote, 'Certainly Blok is not one of us, but he came towards us. And that is what broke him.' But for Pasternak and others among his great successors he was a great and, thankfully, unofficial master. Pasternak said, 'He is free as the wind.'
Writing 'The Twelve' in January 1918, he was 'surrendering himself to the elemental', celebrating in the twelve Red Guards of the title and their heroism and self-denial what he read as the Bolshevik triumph. He was surrendering not to a cause but to a force, not to an ideology (with which he had no patience) but to a sense of his people on the threshold of just and durable change. When the storm passed and the promised transformation of the world failed to come, Blok fell silent.

Alexander Blok (1880-1921) lived through his country's savage wars and radical trauma's, trying to welcome the new order. But there was no space in it for his kind of imagination. Trotsky wrote, 'Certainly Blok is not one of us, but he came towards us. And that is what broke him'. His early poetry is inspired by mystical experience, and the Beautiful Lady in his work is less a conceit than a powerful enabler. When history filled the sky with smoke and put out the stars, this mysticism did not abandon him. Jon Stallworthy, born in 1935, was educated at Rugby, in the Royal West African Frontier Force, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize of Poetry. A Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, he is a Professor of English Literature at Oxford. He has published seven books of poetry. His biography of Wilfred Owen won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He recently published a life of Louis MacNeice. He has edited Owen's Complete Poems and Fragments, Henry Reed's Collected Poems, and several anthologies. Peter France was born in Northern Ireland of Welsh parents and has lived at various places in England, France and Canada. He is now based in Edinburgh, where he was professor of French from 1980 to 2000. A Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he has written many studies of French, Russian and comparative literature, and is the editor of the New Oxford Companion to Literature in Frenchand of the Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation and general editor of the five-volume Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. He has translated French and Russian prose texts as well as several volumes of Russian poetry – Blok andPasternak (both with Jon Stallworthy), Batyushkov, Baratynsky, Lermontov, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and in particular Gennady Aygi, including Selected Poems 1954-1994 (Angel/NorthWestern), Child-and-Rose (New Directions), Field-Russia (New Directions), Winter Revels (Rumor Press), and a book edited by Aygi, the Anthology of Chuvash Poetry..