SOURCE: Ireland, Rosh. Introduction to Bratsk Station and Other New Poems, by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, pp. ix-xxii. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967.

In the following excerpt, Ireland surveys Yevtushenko's career and works.

Lord, let me be a poet, Let me not deceive people. 

Y. Yevtushenko

The last decade has seen in the Soviet Union a striking revival of poetry. Interest in the great poets of this century has quickened. Accomplished living poets, under constraint in Stalin's time, have once again found access to the reading public. A number of young poets have come forward to write poetry of a recognizably new kind, to create a vast and enthusiastic audience not only for themselves but for the great poets they claim as mentors, and to transform poetry into a vital medium of communication, a vehicle of expression through which not only their own thoughts and emotions, but also those of...