ABSTRACT
Poetry early began to decline from the high standards set up by the Golden Age. The harmony, distinction, restraint, and unerring mastery of the great poets from Zhukóvsky to Venev-itinov was soon lost. The art of verse degenerated either into an empty and undistinguished tidiness, or into an equally hollow wit unsupported by inspiration, or into a formless rush of untrans-formed emotion. A veneer of polished versification, covering a void of imagination and substituted for the delicate mastery of the older generation, is the characteristic of all the younger poets who claimed to belong to the older “Poets’ party.” The Petersburg journalists encouraged poetry of a more meretricious type. Its laureate was Vladímir Grigórievich Benedíktov (1807-73), a clerk in the Ministry of Finance and for ten years the idol of all the romantically inclined officials of every rank throughout Russia. His method consisted in squeezing out of a striking metaphor or simile all it could give. A typical poem of his, The Belle of Battles, makes the most of the parallel between the unsheathed saber and the naked woman. Later on, Benedíktov gave up his conceits and developed into a polished versifier of the ordinary type.
