[The] young Akhmatova shuns the obscurity so characteristic of avant-garde verse. When she published her first poems, Russian readers had long been accustomed to expect new poetry not to yield its secrets as easily as hers does. True, her lyrics normally convey no more than an elusive and vague impression of emotions that are themselves elusive and vague. But they are otherwise largely free from obscurity, their originality being that of startling simplicity. The language is straightforward, conversational—at times even prosaic. The mystery lies more in the poet's personality than in her way of expressing herself.

She writes without obtrusive stylistic devices, most lyrics consisting of three or four four-line stanzas, with regular metre often iambic, and with alternate rhyming lines. But this seeming lack of adventurousness conceals much elegant workman ship, and owes some of its success to surprise; it was not what readers had come...