“Poetry Young Ours N. H. Bialik in Politics and Theology

Abstract

This article traces the reasoning and set of interests that led Bialik, Israel's national poet, to write a summation of the state of Hebrew poetry at the beginning of the 20th century. Bialik's article emerges as a juncture of political and literary interventions, at the center of which stand Bialik's multifaceted relations with two rivals - Ahad Ha-am and Berdichevsky. The article potrays the hegemonic subject of the poetry of the time as maintaining a combination of both gnostic vitalism and universaliam. Issue of national poers and weaknesses interact with the problematic of sovereignty, which Hebrew political theology established as a solution to The Jewish Question. The article also focuses on the complex dynamics developing in Israeli national poaetry at the beginning of the 20th century between religiosity and secularism.