In 1956 Nikolai Aseev complained that Soviet poetry in recent years had consisted chiefly of “rhymed information about events which do not arrest the attention of the reader and do not become events in his life,” because it simply “explains, narrates, reports that which has already been heard, understood, known from other sources.” Lyrics, the veteran poet continued, had become merely illustrative, trivial commentary. Critics who tried to talk about the quality of poetry were deemed guilty of “formalism” and “aestheticism,” which, Aseev said, “dooms the accused to a cataleptic silence.” Poets had become fearful and cautious, writing only for the approval of editors, who in turn were governed by a “single taste,” a single standard – that of the late Iosif Stalin.

Aseev was merely saying, rather boldly, what every cultured Russian had long since realized. Poetry had been vulgarized and oversimplified, its field of vision narrowed, and its quality reduced to the schoolboy level. Words had been cheapened and, under the influence of the Party's notions about the educational mission of art, had degenerated into pure rhetoric. Dull and repetitious, lacking in the stimulating complexity of multilayered metaphors and symbols, poetry had been reduced to a state where even elementariness in stanza design was considered a virtue. In these circumstances lyric poetry had been the major victim. The demand that poetry promote official views and popularize Party dogma implied a verse that did not require meditation or study, much less an expression of the poet's personal emotion.