Drawn from Stone and Tristia, the first two collections that established Mandelstam as the finest Acmeist poet, his Classicism precise and jeweled where his contemporaries were either symbolist or bombastic. He was arrested, exiled, re-arrested, and died in a transit camp in 1938 after writing a poem that mocked Stalin's pockmarked face. The Stalin Epigram, memorized and passed hand-to-hand, is the bravest act in 20th-century literature. His widow Nadezhda memorized everything to keep it alive.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.