A Poet is a Poet is a What

First there was the thaw and then the freeze. Yevgeny Yevtushenko represents the slush. In A Precocious Autobiography he tells us repeatedly that he is a poet—but we have only his word for it. In translation, his verses read like P.S. 84 Carl Sandburg., He refers to his early status as that of “a newspaper poet”—and he is still that. Only the newspaper has changed. In a free Russia, he would have gone Unnoticed.

It is not as a poet that Yevgeny Yevtushenko makes his bid for fame in both the Communist and the free world. Adding no new dimensions to Russian verse, he must be read for his political message—and this, interestingly, is no less understood on the windward side of the Iron Curtain than it is to the lee. Because his voice booms like the big bass drum, because his coffee-house manner is unusual in the Soviet Union, the West has seen in him the symbol of a new Russian revolt. It is difficult to understand why the ineffable Nikita has taken even the smallest umbrage.

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Ralph de Toledano

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First there was the thaw and then the freeze. Yevgeny Yevtushenko represents the slush. In A Precocious Autobiography he tells us repeatedly that he is a poet—but we have only his word for it. In translation, his verses read like P.S. 84 Carl Sandburg., He refers to his early status as that of “a newspaper poet”—and he is still that. Only the newspaper has changed. In a free Russia, he would have gone Unnoticed.

It is not as a poet that Yevgeny Yevtushenko makes his bid for fame in both the Communist and the free world. Adding no new dimensions to Russian verse, he must be read for his political message—and this, interestingly, is no less understood on the windward side of the Iron Curtain than it is to the lee. Because his voice booms like the big bass drum, because his coffee-house manner is unusual in the Soviet Union, the West has seen in him the symbol of a new Russian revolt. It is difficult to understand why the ineffable Nikita has taken even the smallest umbrage.