During his lifetime, Chaim Nachman Bialik was hailed and the poet larueate of Jewish nationalism and was regarded as one of the major Jewish cultural influences of his age. He was seen as the poet of hope and revival in an age which witnessed the Russian Pale of Settlement, pogroms, the Russian Revoltuion, the rise of Zionim and of Hebrew as a living language. David Aberbach explores the historical, social and literary background to Bialik's rise a a Romantic-nationalist poet, his ambivalence to this national role, his obsession with intensely private themes and the interplay between the public figure and the confessional lyric poet. Aberbach shows how Bialik's poetry reveals a profoundly tortured inner life and how strongly he felt the inseparble links between his art and his life.