Acmeism

Acmeism was a Russian poetry movement founded around 1912 by Nikolai Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetsky as a reaction against the mysticism and vagueness of Russian Symbolism, taking its name from the Greek akme, the highest point, to signal an ambition toward clarity, precision and craftsmanship in poetic language. Centered on the Guild of Poets, its leading figures beyond its founders included Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev's wife, and Osip Mandelstam, who together produced some of the most enduring poetry of the Russian Silver Age, favoring concrete imagery, formal discipline and a groundedness in the physical, cultural and historical world over Symbolism's search for hidden spiritual meanings. The movement was effectively suppressed under Stalin, with Gumilev executed in 1921 and Mandelstam dying in a Soviet labor camp in 1938, but Akhmatova's long survival and continued writing carried Acmeist clarity and craft forward as a living influence on later twentieth-century Russian poetry.