Achmatova Hears Whitman Singing: Poems of Origins United by Shards and Drifts

The article discusses in detail the similarities between Anna Akhmatova's long poem ‘By the Very Sea’ (1914) and Walt Whitman's ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ (1859). The numerous correspondences between these poems on thematic, formal, intonational, etc. levels are not accidental, since Akhmatova was aware of the work of her American predecessor.