THE FIRST decade of this century was a turning point in the development of European critical thought. The problems of literary form, long neglected or relegated to the background, found themselves suddenly the center of the critic's attention. In Russia this recrudescence of interest in literary craft, especially in verse structure, was closely linked to the revival of poetry brought about by the rise of the Symbolist movement. It was from the leading representatives of this school that the study of poetic language received its most powerful stimulus. The emergence of the Symbolist movement raised conspicuously the level of poetic craftsmanship in Russia. Verse writing, which had been overshadowed by prose fiction since the mid-nineteenth century, staged a triumphant comeback. The flat and anemic poetry of Nekrasov's followers gave way to Valeri Bryusov's Parnassian mastery of form, to the lush rhythms of Konstantin Balmont, and, above all, to the irresistible verbal magic of Aleksandr Blok. And in the wake of this poetic revival came a renascence of verse study, a concerted effort to attack the problems of poetic technique from the viewpoint of the Symbolist school. This close interrelation between creative practice and literary theory was not in itself a novel phenomenon in the history of Russian letters. Since the eighteenth century every literary school had had its critical spokesmen who attempted to justify theoretically and to raise to the status of immutable laws the current exigencies of aesthetic sensibility. In the Symbolist era, however, this alliance of the artist and the theorist assumed the form of organic symbiosis. It was the poet rather than the professional literary scholar who now took the lead in exploring the secrets of the creative laboratory. This practitioner's theorizing could not, to be sure, remain unaffected by contemporary developments in the field of academic philology. Andrei Bely, the most remarkable prose writer and influential literary theorist of the time, studied assiduously Potebnya's theory of poetic language.1 Valeri Bryusov, an astute analyst of verse as well as its consummate master, discussed problems of prosody with Professor F. Korsh,