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.

“I am reminded once again of Brodsky’s fine account of Anna Akhmatova’s ability to see the tragic events of her time ‘first through the prism of the individual heart, then through the prism of history’. What remains so striking about such a vision, continues Brodsky, is that ‘These two perspectives were brought into sharp focus through prosody, which is simply a repository of time within language’. Simply? Ian Probstein’s The River of Time offers the help we need to gauge the real complexity of that word ‘simply’.” — Peter Nicholls, Textual Practice, Vol. 32. No. 3

• IntroductionForms of Time-Space (Chronotope) in PoetryPart One. Beyond Barriers: Avant-Gardе and Futurism1. Forms of Chronotope in Avant-Garde Poetry2. “The King of Time” and “The Slave of Time”: Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir MayakovskyPart 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 Pound3. 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 Imagination2. “Liberation from the Future as well as the Past”: Time-Space and History in Four QuartetsPart 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 BibliographyIndex