The Best Soviet Poet

http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/demo/poetpage/mayakovsky.html
http://www.uvm.edu/~sgutman/mayakovsky.htm

Mayakovsky was arguably one of the best Russian poets, and was so in the Pushkin tradition. A convinced Soviet, he was also one of their fiercest and inspired critics, and his propaganda never destroyed his lyricism. Pasternak wrote that he inflated his talent and tortured it until it burst - disdaining to play a role in life, he played the character of Life itself. Ultimately, his contradictions lead to suicide. But not before he had effortlessly produced some of the best Russian Futuristic verse. Mayakovsky was no cynic and no compromiser. He may not have been a nice guy, and he was certainly strange, but I recommend his Cloud in Pants. He missed his time period of birth, for he would have been much at home in Putin's Russian Federation. Indeed, much of Mayakovsky's verse has a watery or windy element to it, a push to the future that may be. He seems to have been made, as Charles Baudelaire was, in the old mold, and definitely out of his sphere among the relatively degraded characters he had to associate with. His sentiments were from the old liberal era of the 18th century, combined with a relish for change and human progress.