Acmeist poetry
Acmeism, or the Guild of Poets, was a modernist transient poetic school, which emerged c. 1911 or in 1912 in Russia under the leadership of Nikolay Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetsky. Their ideals were compactness of form and clarity of expression.
Reference Check
Propose documentary evidence for Acmeist poetry. A contribution is never written directly as fact: identity, source, rights and evidence gates still decide.
Sign in to contribute
World of VALÉORINE
Documentary connections
Only confirmed graph relationships appear here. Images are shown only when their identity and reuse rights both pass the documentary gate.
In this article
History
History
The term was coined after the Greek word ἀκμή (akmē), 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) to "Dionysian frenzy" propagated by the Russian symbolist 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". 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, and the Parnassian poets among their predecessors.
Major poets
Major poets
Major poets in this school include Osip Mandelstam, Nikolay Gumilev, Mikhail Kuzmin, Anna Akhmatova, and Georgiy Ivanov. 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.
Variations in style
Variations in style
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.
Text attribution
Licensing
Text attribution
Part of the biographical narrative on this page reuses licensed material. Its origin, revision and licence are recorded here.
The biographical narrative on this page is based on the Wikipedia article Acmeist poetry, revision 1356435984 (EN edition), by its contributors. VALÉORINE has edited that text and built its own documentary record around it. The reused material is available under CC BY-SA 4.0, and this page's reuse of it is offered under the same licence. Everything else on this page — the chronology, the holdings, the evidence, the plates and the connections — is VALÉORINE's own record. Sources and licences.
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Oxford University Press. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 2015. 9780191783234.
- 2.Princeton University Press. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 5–6. 2012. 978-0-691-15491-6.
- 3.Merriam-Webster. Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. 9. 1995. 0-87779-042-6.
- 4.Poem for the Day, Two, The Nicholas Albery Foundation, Chatto and Windus, London
- 5.C.E. Preston. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Blackwell. 7. 1998. 0-631-20271-4.
- 6.Routledge. Who's Who in Twentieth Century World Poetry. 8. 2001. 0-415-16355-2.
- 7.Cambridge University Press. The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry. 8. 2004. 0-521-00493-4.
- 8.Poets, Academy of American. poets.org.
The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 26 September 2026.
Elsewhere in General
22,760 published records in this field, each with its sources named.
- Achkhoy-MartanPlace
- Aci CastelloPlace
- AcirealePlace
- Ackworth SchoolOrganisation
- AcquignyPlace
- AcsádPlace
- Acton ValePlace
- Acuña MunicipalityPlace
Best supported in this field
For owners
Own an object connected with Acmeist poetry?
A specialist will read what you send and tell you what the house can establish, what it cannot, and whether the object is suited to sale. There is no charge and no obligation. The object stays with you throughout; nothing is shipped to us unless it is arranged in writing beforehand.