In line with this stance, Blok increasingly perceived the poet's role as being that of vox populi, and he repudiated the extreme individualism of some of his first-generation predecessors, such as Valerii Iakovlevich Briusov, Fedor Sologub (Fedor Kuz'mich Teternikov), and Konstantin Dmitrievich Bal'mont.
Another dividing line between the two generations of Russian Symbolists may be found in their respective stances toward nature: the first-generation Symbolists, like Briusov, often exalted art above nature, while the second-generation Symbolists sought to penetrate the mysteries of nature via artistic intuition. In Blok's work the pantheistic element is particularly strong. Yet, these lines of division were not absolute; various aspects of Symbolism coexisted throughout the movement and within individual poets. Blok no doubt had his decadent phases and individualistic moments, during which he denied what he had previously exalted (ethics as an inseparable aspect of beauty) and exalted what he had previously denied (amoral beauty). The tension between his desire to serve the "Ideal" and his actual betrayals of it can be seen as an overarching theme of his poetry. The emblem of his art, nevertheless, is not the "flowers of evil" glorified by the French decadent poet Charles Baudelaire but, rather, the "blue flower" of German Romanticism.
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