[Anna Akhmatova's Selected Poems] ranges from whispers to anguished screams, from personal happiness to the most acute personal distress. It is lyrical, modest, feminine, narrow in tone and form. The sensibility of many passages is admirable, and has encouraged scores of young "unofficial" poets in Russia, brought up to despise sensibility, nevertheless to give expression to their own.

In her youth Akhmatova was capable of turning out sentimental trash such as "The Grey-Eyed King": the triteness of this ballad is difficult to appreciate unless one actually hears the tum-tee-tee, tum-tee-tee of the original Russian; but the fact that it was set to even triter music by the émigré chansonnier Vertinsky, and sung at moments of boozy nostalgia in those countless Russian restaurants and cafés that abounded in at least three continents during the 1920s and 1930s, speaks for itself. At her worst, Anna Akhmatova was less good...