It is very easy for any book reader to see that parts of Yevtushenko's loose series of poems that make up a hymn of praise to The Bratsk Station (a new Siberian hydro-electric development) would sound magnificent at a public reading, particularly those with a strong repetitious thrust like The Execution of Stenka Razin and Envoys are Going to Lenin. Yet one feels with these poems … that there are verbally intoxicated writers who don't worry much about putting down the right words in the right order.

There are several important exceptions to this intoxication—a delicate poem of Yevtushenko's called The Far Cry [is an example] …—but it is impossible not to feel that [he has] sacrificed too much for the sake of immediate intelligibility…. I suppose if you are a public poet like Yevtushenko, consciously a Russian patriot, you are bound to produce extravagantly phrased poems on...