Joseph Brodsky’s Constellation of Poets

Man is what he reads, and poets even more so.

—Joseph Brodsky

Many of the best Soviet writers were crushed and annihilated under Stalin. Osip Mandelstam died in a prison camp; Isaac Babel was executed; Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Marina Tsvetaeva committed suicide; Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn went into exile in the United States but later returned to Europe. Joseph Brodsky, in contrast, fled to the United States, married, had a child, and remained in America. He took pains to become culturally acclimatized, and he learned to write poetry and criticism in English. Apart from Samuel Beckett’s writing in French, all major authors who changed languages—Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and Arthur Koestler—moved, like Brodsky, from their native tongues into English.

Why was Brodsky, the perennial outsider in his own land, so enthusiastically taken in here? He became a close friend of Mikhail Baryshnikov, was translated by eminent poets such as Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, and gave sixty poetry readings during the first eighteen months in his new country. He was published in the New York Review of Books, was elected poet laureate of the U.S., and won distinguished professorships, a Guggenheim fellowship, the French Légion d’Honneur, membership in the American Academy, the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, honorary doctorates from Oxford and Yale, a MacArthur award, and the Nobel Prize—which W. H. Auden, whom Brodsky rightly considered infinitely superior to himself, did not receive. In short, after his change of empires, he reaped every reward and honor the American artistic and intellectual world could bestow upon a poet.

Except for physical beauty and a successful suicide (though he did once cut his wrists), Brodsky had every extra-literary quality that could enhance a reputation. He dropped out of school at fifteen, which allowed his originality to flourish, and gained unusual experience as a geologist in Siberia. His poems were condemned, suppressed, and confined to the underground in Russia. He showed courage and a stoical lack of complaint as a Jewish victim of Soviet persecution, became a legend when the transcript of his trial was published in the West, spent time in psychiatric hospitals and prisons, and was sent into harsh exile in the Arctic Circle. He derived tragic authority from several heart attacks, heart operations, and the threat of an early death, and had the same blessing and encouragement of Auden (who wrote the foreword to his Selected Poems) as he had had from Anna Akhmatova. He lived modestly and was generous to Russian exiles, was an impressive personality and inspiring teacher, and was charismatic in conversation and in the strongly accented, bardic chanting of his poems. He quickly learned English and wrote impressively in his new language. Though his involuntary exile was a fortunate escape and his life in America infinitely better than in Russia, he had lost his country, his language, his parents, his lovers, and two children. But, as his translator Daniel Weissbort observes, “he made light of exile, stressing the gains both material and spiritual or intellectual, minimizing the losses.”

His poems were first written in Russian, then translated by him and others into English, and finally written in English. But most of his criticism, Less Than One (1986) and On Grief and Reason (1995), was originally written in English; and he spoke with authority when describing how poets create. Brodsky’s superb essays on ten modern poets not only illuminate their subjects, but also define his own literary lineage and reveal how he became an American poet. Two of them were women and three—Akhmatova, Auden, and Spender—were close friends. The other poets he admired were Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva, Rainer Maria Rilke, Constantine Cavafy and Eugenio Montale, Hardy and Frost. While maintaining his love for Russian poetry, he also took possession of Anglophone poets—especially Hardy, Frost, and Auden—and learned from them how to become a poet and critic in English.

Brodsky’s sympathetic account of his constellation of modern poets and mentors is an intellectual autobiography that complements his own poetry and provides insight into how his mind...