| Summary: | Rightly appreciated as a 'poet's poet', Mandelstam has been habitually read as a repository of learned allusion. Yet as Seamus Heaney observed, his work is 'as firmly rooted in both an historical and cultural context as real as Joyce's 'Ulysses' or Eliot's 'Waste Land.' Great lyric poets offer a cross-section of their times, and Mandelstam's poems represent the worlds of politics, history, art, and ideas about intimacy and creativity. The interconnections between these domains and Mandelstam's writings are the subject of this text, showing how engaged the poet was with the history, social movements, political ideology, and aesthetics of his time. The importance of the work also lies in showing how literature, no less than history and philosophy, enables readers to confront the huge upheaval in outlook can demand of us.
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