Michael Wachtel is Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. He is the author of Russian Symbolism and Literary Tradition: Goethe, Novalis, and the Poetics of Vyacheslav Ivanov (1994) and The Development of Russian Verse: Meter and its Meanings (Cambridge, 1998).

• Preface; Acknowledgments; Note on translations and transliterations; Introduction; Part I. Concepts: 1. Versification: how to do things with words; 2. Poetic language; 3. Tradition and the individual talent; Part II. Interpretation: 4. From the ode to the elegy (and beyond); 5. The ballad; 6. Love poetry; 7. Nature poetry; 8. Patriotic verse; Conclusion.

'This book will help students who are making the leap across the apparently daunting gap between coping with spoken Russian or Russian prose and tackling a poetic text … A helpful index of poetic terms and a reassuringly select list of further reading are provided to help those who are entirely new to the topic. The book is … a 'guide to reading, interpreting, and appreciating it' … This aim is most certainly achieved … This book offers a concise and concentrated account of the things that poets can do with words, and readers with texts.' MLR