Russian-American poet (1940-1996)
A poet the Soviet Union couldn't tolerate and the West couldn't ignore. Brodsky's verse carried enough clarity and weight that exile became a Nobel Prize, a laureateship, and the rarest thing in Russian letters: canonization while still alive.
Born in Leningrad in 1940, Iosif Brodsky learned his craft under the suspicion of Soviet authorities who eventually expelled him in 1972. W. H. Auden helped him settle in the United States, where he taught at Mount Holyoke, Yale, Columbia, Cambridge, and Michigan. The Nobel committee awarded him its literature prize in 1987 for "an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity." He became U.S. Poet Laureate in 1991. Moscow State University's Andrey Ranchin calls him "the only modern Russian poet whose body of work has already been awarded the honorary title of a…
Sourced, dated quotes from Joseph Brodsky
For darkness restores what light cannot repair. There we are married, blest, we make once more the two-backed beast and children are the fair excuse of what we're naked for.
You know, when you go outside on the streets after having spent the day writing, you feel like a foreign body, even in your own country.
He’d be a ruin by now, both physically and mentally. Physically because of the bottle. . . .
The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win.
It is the army that finally makes a citizen of you; without it you still have a chance, however slim, to remain a human being.
The six component signals behind the Fame score, and their ranks across the leaderboards.
Similar profiles worth watching
.jpg?width=1200)
.jpg?width=1200)
