The “Prose Tradition” in Poetry: The Self in Achmatova, Eliot, and Tolstoj

T.S. Eliot's influence on Akhmatova's late work is well known, but the connection between their earliest poems remains obscure. Their works of the 1910s exemplified “Tempered Modernism”, characterized by precision, restraint, and equilibrium between subjectivity and objectivity. One path towards these goals was by modeling the poem after the nineteenth-century novel; Pound viewed this “prose tradition” of poetry as a means of restraining self-expression. Both Akhmatova and Eliot exemplify this approach, utilizing Tolstoyan techniques and emphasizing body language in order to concisely imply an untold narrative, indirectly disclose emotion, and temper the expression of the self.