How modernist interartistic experimentation and the proliferation of new media technologies inspired fresh insights into poetry

Isobel Palmer spotlights Russian modernist poets’ and formalist theorists’ conscious engagement with formal convention, showing how their efforts were tied up with broader attempts in the early Soviet era to understand and articulate the nature of poetry and its most characteristic devices. Returning to critical debates around poetic encounters with three key aesthetic categories—rhythm, image, and voice—Palmer unpacks the period’s deeper interest in the material bases of poetic speech itself. Through fresh, incisive readings of canonical poets and theorists, from Andrei Bely and Vladimir Mayakovsky to Yury Tynianov and Viktor Shklovsky, Revolutions in Verse: The Medium of Russian Modernism explores the proliferation of interartistic experiments and the emergence of new media technologies that made poetry visible as a medium in its own right.

ISOBEL PALMER is a lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham.

"What constitutes the medium of language arts? In this masterful study, Palmer reconstructs the debates surrounding the concepts of ‘rhythm,’ ‘image,’ and ‘voice,’ which she rightfully places at the center of competing trends within Russian modernist literary experimentation and formalist poetics."—Ana Hedberg Olenina, Arizona State University