Acmeism, or the Guild of Poets, was a transient poetic school which emerged in 1910 in Russia under the leadership of Nikolai Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky

Sergei Gorodetsky

Sergey Mitrofanovich Gorodetsky was a Russian poet, one of the founders of Guild of Poets .Gorodetsky entered the literary scene as a Symbolist, developing friendships with Blok, Ivanov, and Briusov...

. The term was coined after the Greek word acme, i.e., "the best age of man".

The Acmeist mood was first announced by Mikhail Kuzmin

Mikhail Kuzmin

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin was a Russian poet, musician and novelist, a prominent contributor to the Silver Age of Russian Poetry.Born into a noble family in Yaroslavl, Kuzmin grew up in St. Petersburg and studied music at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov...

 in his 1910 essay "Concerning Beautiful Clarity". The Acmeists contrasted the ideal of Apollo

Apollo

Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in Greek and Roman mythology...

nian clarity (hence the name of their journal, Apollo) to "Dionysian frenzy" propagated by the Russian Symbolist poets like Bely

Andrei Bely

Andrei Bely was the pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev , a Russian novelist, poet, theorist, and literary critic. His novel Petersburg was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century.-Biography:...

 and Vyacheslav Ivanov. To the Symbolists' preoccupation with "intimations through symbols" they preferred "direct expression through images".

In his later manifesto "The Morning of Acmeism" (1913), Osip Mandelstam

Osip Mandelstam

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets...

 defined the movement as "a yearning for world culture". As a "neo-classical

Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome...

 form of modernism

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

" which essentialized "poetic craft and cultural continuity", the Guild of Poets placed Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...

, Théophile Gautier

Théophile Gautier

Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....

, Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...

, Innokentiy Annensky, and the Parnassian poets among their predecessors.

Major poets in this school include Nikolay Gumilyov

Nikolay Gumilyov

Nikolay Stepanovich Gumilev was an influential Russian poet who founded the acmeism movement.-Early life and poems:Nikolai was born in the town of Kronstadt on Kotlin Island, into the family of Stepan Yakovlevich Gumilev , a naval physician, and Anna Ivanovna L'vova . His childhood nickname was...

, Osip Mandelstam

Osip Mandelstam

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets...

, Mikhail Kuzmin

Mikhail Kuzmin

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin was a Russian poet, musician and novelist, a prominent contributor to the Silver Age of Russian Poetry.Born into a noble family in Yaroslavl, Kuzmin grew up in St. Petersburg and studied music at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov...

, Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko , better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova , was a Russian and Soviet modernist poet, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Russian canon.Harrington p11...

, and Georgiy Ivanov. The group originally met in The Stray Dog Cafe, St Petersburg

Stray Dog Café

Stray Dog Cafe is located at Ploshchad Isskustv, Square of the Arts up to Summer Gardens, St. Petersburg, Russia....

, then a celebrated meeting place for artists and writers. Mandelstam's collection of poems Stone (1912) is considered the movement's finest accomplishment.