Acmeism, or the Guild of Poets, was a transient poetic school, which emerged in 1912 in Russia under the leadership of
Nikolay Gumilev and
Sergei Gorodetsky
Sergey Mitrofanovich Gorodetsky (; – June 8, 1967) was a poet who lived in the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. He was one of the founders (together with Nikolay Gumilev) of "Guild of Poets" (). He was born in Saint Petersburg, and d ...
. Their ideals were compactness of form and clarity of expression. The term was coined after the Greek word άκμη (''ákmē''), i.e., "the best age of man".
The acmeist mood was first announced by
Mikhail Kuzmin in his 1910 essay "Concerning Beautiful Clarity". The acmeists contrasted the ideal of
Apollonian clarity (hence the name of their journal, ''
Apollon
Apollon may refer to:
* Apollo, ancient Greek god of light, healing and poetry
* Apollon (Formula One), Formula One constructor
* Apollon Kalamarias, Greek football club
* Apollon Athens, a Greek football club from Athens
* Apollon Limassol B.C., ...
''
) to "
Dionysian frenzy" propagated by the
Russian symbolist
Russian symbolism was an intellectual and artistic movement predominant at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It arose separately from European symbolism, emphasizing mysticism and ostranenie.
Literature
Influences
Primary ...
poets like
Bely and
Vyacheslav Ivanov. To the Symbolists' preoccupation with "intimations through symbols" they preferred "direct expression through images".
In his later manifesto "The Morning of Acmeism" (1913),
Osip Mandelstam defined the movement as "a yearning for
world culture
Cross-cultural studies, sometimes called holocultural studies or comparative studies, is a specialization in anthropology and sister sciences such as sociology, psychology, economics, political science that uses field data from many societies thr ...
". As a "
neo-classical form of
modernism", which essentialized "poetic craft and cultural continuity", the Guild of Poets placed
Alexander Pope,
Théophile Gautier,
Rudyard Kipling,
Innokentiy Annensky
Innokenty Fyodorovich Annensky ( rus, Инноке́нтий Фёдорович А́нненский, p=ɪnɐˈkʲenʲtʲɪj ˈfʲɵdərəvʲɪtɕ ˈanʲɪnskʲɪj, a=Innokyentiy Fyodorovich Annyenskiy.ru.vorb.oga; (1 September Old_Style_and_New ...
, and the
Parnassian poets among their predecessors.
Major poets in this school include
Osip Mandelstam,
Nikolay Gumilev,
Mikhail Kuzmin,
Anna Akhmatova, and
Georgiy Ivanov
Georgy Vladimirovich Ivanov (russian: Гео́ргий Влади́мирович Ива́нов; in Puki Estate, Seda Volost, Kovno Governorate – 26 August 1958 in Hyères, Var, France) was a leading poet and essayist of the Russian emigrati ...
. The group originally met in
The Stray Dog Cafe, St. Petersburg, then a celebrated meeting place for artists and writers. Mandelstam's collection of poems ''Stone'' (1912) is considered the movement's finest accomplishment.
Amongst the major acmeist poets, each interpreted acmeism in a different stylistic light, from Akhmatova's intimate poems on topics of love and relationships to Gumilev's narrative verse.
See also
*
Imagism
*
Symbolist Poetry
Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realis ...
References
Russian poetry
Literary movements
Russian literary movements
1910 introductions
20th-century literature
20th-century Russian literature
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