SOURCE: "The Violence of Collision: Hebrew Poetry Today," in the Literary Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, Winter, 1983, pp. 196-210.

In the following essay, Levin explores theme, subject matter, and style in modern Hebrew poetry.

The recent publication of the Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (edited by T. Carmi) will both delight the English-speaking reader with its storehouse of ancient and modern poetry and serve to dispel a number of preconceptions concerning the practice of Hebrew poetry throughout the ages. We have been led to believe, for example, that Hebrew as a living language was miraculously revived toward the end of the nineteenth century as political and cultural Zionism gained momentum in Europe. Some will point to such figures as Ahad Ha'am, Bialik, and a host of Jewish writers and intellectuals who gathered in Odessa in the 1880s and not only spoke and wrote in Hebrew but argued heatedly in its...