Mandelstam's Worlds

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, ar...