SOURCE: "Anna of All the Russias," in New York Review of Books, Vol. 40, No. 9, May 13, 1993, pp. 25-7.

In the following review, Bayley presents an overview of Akhmatova's life and career in his discussion of three works concerning the poet: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer: Remembering Anna Akhmatova, by Anatoly Nayman; and In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova, by Susan Amert.

Poetry must somehow proclaim its authority. However mysteriously this comes about, its achievement can always be recognized; a great poem continues to assert its magisterial spell in the face of all the tyranny or indifference of passing events. When Yeats wrote in 1919, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity," he could not have known that before the end of the century, at a time when convictions of any sort were hard to come...