Poets

This chapter explores the development of poetry at court and among Chancery clerks. It looks at the cultural processes behind the migration of humanist and neo-Latin culture to Moscow and the slow assimilation of rhetoric and a new poetics in a challenging context controlled by the church. Active outside the court, although still in the vicinity, a group known as Chancery poets adapted lyric forms in syllabic verse to their own expressive needs. The chapter provides an introduction to Polotsky’s major collections, and discusses the verbal, prosodic, and visual techniques that Polotsky and his followers used in their vast production of work for the court, exemplified in the use of the poetic labyrinth and calligraphic poetry. In describing how a transitional print culture impinged on Polotsky’s poetic production, the chapter also addresses the question of Polotsky’s legacy and the balance between continuity and discontinuity with the eighteenth century.