SOURCE: "The Position of Alexander Blok," in The Criterion, Vol. XI, No. XLIV, April, 1932, pp. 422-38.

In the following essay, Bowra assesses Blok's place among European poets, identifying and examining three phases in his poetic development.

Alexander Block died on August 7th, 1921. His funeral was conducted with all the honours due to a great poet who had died before his time at the early age of forty-one. In the ten years since his death his reputation has not suffered, and impartial judges place him in the select company of great Russian poets. But he has left no followers. The man who wrote the first and greatest poem of the Russian Revolution has become a figure of history, admired for his poetic achievement, studied with the sympathy and slight condescension that we keep for the past, but without followers and without influence on living writers. Modern Russia has made...