Looking Back from Exile

Collected Poems in English 

by Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky was born on May 24th in Leningrad in 1940. He was arrested at age twenty-three and sentenced to five years on a prison farm for “having a worldview damaging to the state, decadence and modernism, failure to finish school, and social parasitism … except for the writing of awful poems.” He then was expelled ("strongly advised" to emigrate) from the Soviet Union in 1972, settling in the United States with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity". He was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1991.

The lines below are from “May 24, 1980,” Brodsky’s poem looking back from exile in America on his fortieth birthday:



…I have waded the steppes that saw yelling Huns in saddles,
worn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter,
planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables,
guzzled everything save dry water.
I've admitted the sentries' third eye into my wet and foul
dreams. Munched the bread of exile; it's stale and warty.
Granted my lungs all sounds except the howl;
switched to a whisper. Now I am forty.
What should I say about my life? That it's long and abhors transparence.
Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me vomit.
Yet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx,
only gratitude will be gushing from it.


My previous commentaries on his essays and poetry can be found at Poetic Essays and What is Poetry?

Poetic Essays

On Grief and Reason: Essays 

by Joseph Brodsky

"Now that you know the background of what I am about to say, I may just as well say it:  The way to develop good taste in literature is to read poetry.  If you think that I am speaking out of professional partisanship, that I am trying to advance my own guild interests, you are mistaken:  I am no union man.  The point is that being the supreme form of human locution, poetry is not only the most concise, the most condensed way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation--especially one on paper." (Joseph Brodsky, "How to Read a Book" in On grief and Reason: Essays, p 100)


On Grief and Reason is a collection of twenty-one essays, all but one written since 1986. Of these, some are without question on a par with the best of his earlier collection, Less Than One. In “Spoils of War,” for instance—an essay classical in form, light in touch—Brodsky continues the amusing and sometimes poignant story of his youth, using those traces of the West—corned-beef cans and shortwave radios as well as movies and jazz—that found their way through the Iron Curtain to explore the meaning of the West to Russians. Given the imaginative intensity with which they pored over these artifacts, Brodsky suggests, Russians of his generation were “the real Westerners, perhaps the only ones.” The breadth of the essays is impressive ranging from topics unfamiliar to me like "Profile of Clio" to others that were closer to home; the latter included essays on reading, Horace, and Stephen Spender.  While there were magnificent commentaries such as "Homage to Marcus Aurelius", a vision of the man that only someone with a poetic imagination could obtain. Brodsky sees through the ages into the loneliness and endurance of a good ruler. He ends the essay with the most appropriate words, those of Marcus Aurelius himself. This collection of essays is valuable for insight and inspiration, and I return to it as I do with any classic anticipating further encouragement on the road to wisdom.

On Grief and Reason: Essays by Joseph Brodsky. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995.

What is Poetry?

Joseph Brodsky

What is poetry? Joseph Brodsky, who died on this day in 1996, aged fifty-five, insisted that poetry's job was to explore the capacity of language to travel farther and faster. Poetry, he said, is accelerated thinking. When thinking of poetry it is worthwhile, and enjoyable, to consider and reflect on the poetry of those who, like Joseph Brodsky, have created superlative examples of verse and who have thought well and often about the subject.


I enjoy reading his poetry to experience his way of exploring "the capacity of language" to deal with ideas and move our hearts. Given the extreme circumstances of his life and the rewards he received for his poetic art this is an inspirational experience. In anticipation of his death he penned the poem Taps which opens with the following lines:


I've been reproached for everything save the weather
and in turn my own neck was seeking a scimitar.
But soon, I'm told, I'll lose my epaulets altogether
and dwindle into a little star.

Perhaps "a little star"; but he remains, for those of us who appreciate his poetry, a Supernova of twentieth century literature.


Collected Poems in English by Joseph Brodsky. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. (2000)