A New Look at Joseph Brodsky's Poetry

A new selection of Joseph Brodsky's poetry, Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems, 1968-1996 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), provides readers with an opportunity to follow Brodsky's path from exile to poet of "language's future," writes the volume's editor Ann Kjellberg at New York Review of Books. Even as a teenager, Kjellberg explains, "Brodsky shared this abundance of reading—as wide around the world and as deep into the past as he could go within the constraints of Soviet publishing of the time—with his peers, a generation of young Russian intellectuals peeking warily over the edge of the war’s ruins, hungering for art and knowledge and experience to press against the 'trimming of the self' required by the state." More: 

…Self-educated, intense, impulsive, unmoored, Brodsky emerged into this setting as a poetic virtuoso; he did things with Russian verse that no one had thought possible. His mentor Anna Akhmatova, revered for having asserted her poetic autonomy even when threatened with death and imprisonment, immediately pronounced him the carrier of the embers of Russian verse, which doomed him to unwavering attention from the authorities. Others of this cohort, precisely because their commitment was to art, had proved themselves quite ungovernable and were continually in the crosshairs of the state.

Brodsky took the medium of formal poetry—capable of high lyricism, polished to an imperial shine by the wryly skeptical Pushkin and his circle, molded to the agonies of war and oppression by Akhmatova and her generation—and lashed it to a modern sensibility. His idiom embraced classical poise, Biblical gravitas, philosophical disenchantment, and street slang. Within the confines of his book-walled lair, he searched the world for models and peers, coming to rest on English as a needed counterweight: a tonality that was quotidian and anti-hysterical, a mighty tradition nested in a gentle landscape.

Continue at NYRB.