River of Time

Ian Probstein is associate professor of English at Touro College. He has published ten books of poetry, translated more than a dozen poetry volumes; and has compiled and edited more than thirty books and anthologies of poetry in translation.

“Ian Probstein’s magisterial study of the aesthetics of time in modernist and contemporary poetry offers illuminating exegeses of touchstone poems by Mandelstam, Eliot, Khlebnikov, Yeats, Pound, Brodsky, and Ashbery, among others. With the dialectical force of a ‘feast of citations,’ The River of Time brilliantly interweaves Russian and American poetry.”

• Introduction. Forms of Time-Space (Chronotope) in Poetry Part One. Beyond Barriers: Avant-Gardе and Futurism 1. Forms of Chronotope in Avant-Garde Poetry 2. “The King of Time” and “The Slave of Time”: Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky Part Two. Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam, W. B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound 1. Nature and “The Artifice of Eternity”: The Relation to Nature and Reality for Yeats, Pound, and Mandelstam 2. “Sailing to Byzantium”—“Sailing after Knowledge”: Byzantium as a Symbol of Cultural Heritage in Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 3. Fear and Awe: Osip Mandelstam’s “The Slate Ode” Part Three. T. S. Eliot: “Liberation from the Future as Well as the Past” 1. The Waste Land as a Human Drama Revealed by Eliot’s Dialogic Imagination 2. “Liberation from the Future as well as the Past”: Time-Space and History in Four Quartets Part Four. Joseph Brodsky: “The River of Time” or “What Gets Left of a Man” Part Five. John Ashbery: “Time Is an Emulsion” Part Six. Charles Bernstein: “Of Time and the Line” Abbreviations Bibliography Index