Muscular Christianity

Melodrama, Feeling, and Emotion in the Early Poetry of Anna Akhmatova

“…The speaker's reliving in memory of a painful emotional moment suggests a certain sentimentality, a 'clinging to an emotional experience which has become a pleasurable end in itself', and thus conveys the 'melodramatic masochism' that Kelly ascribes to her. 90 This poem, however, also displays features which, while they undoubtedly make the poem dramatic, cannot necessarily be thought of as melodramatic. Despite the fact that the This short poem implies a narrative involving adultery and betrayal.…”

Melodrama, Feeling, and Emotion in the Early Poetry of Anna Akhmatova

“…The speaker's reliving in memory of a painful emotional moment suggests a certain sentimentality, a 'clinging to an emotional experience which has become a pleasurable end in itself', and thus conveys the 'melodramatic masochism' that Kelly ascribes to her. 90 This poem, however, also displays features which, while they undoubtedly make the poem dramatic, cannot necessarily be thought of as melodramatic. Despite the fact that the lyric centres upon a moment of emotional intensity, heightened through the marked contrasts and extremes (light and darkness, life and death) typically found in melodrama, the persona's feelings are conveyed not by an extravagant or histrionic gesture such as those employed by Dostoevskii in the scene from The Idiot, but by the tiny, yet eloquent mistake of putting a glove on the wrong hand.…”