Joseph Brodsky, who looked at life from above, belonged to the great Russian tradition. He used the intergeneric dialogue of fictional and historical writing in his works to describe an aristocracy of the mind, the themes of exile and homelessness and the atmosphere of that ghostly, fantastical, troubled world of Stalins Russia. And like many Russian writers, Brodsky is more emotional than intellectual. This is reflected consistently in his earlier writings and his final collection of essays, On Grief and Reason (Hamish Hamilton, Special Indian price, 15).
In his autobiographical essay in Less than One, Brodsky revealed his melancholy mood when he hinted that beyond the circle of his scene seems to be a great space which flows in at the window, presses upon people, isolates them, makes them incapable of action, indifferent to effect, sincere and open-minded. Elsewhere he says that in Russia, people who are committed to insane asylums are not those who have lost their reason, but those who have suddenly acquired it. Much the same ambience is seen in his latest collection which deals with the nature of poetry, politics and an autobiography in parts with the underlying reflections that verse really does, in Akhmatovas words, grow from rubbish; the roots of prose are no more honourable...
Brodsky repeatedly reflected on the condition of exiles, the wanderers across language, of an inner void that needed to be filled a longing for something lost or forgotten, and at the same time, a forward quest.
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In The Condition We Call Exile, Brodsky hints that exile is an unbearable rift between the self and its true love and its essential sadness could never be fulfilled. If it could be healed, it would only be through literature which was the only form of moral insurance that a society has;... the permanent antidote to the dog-eat-dog principle... the best argument against any form of bulldozer type mass solution if only because human diversity is literatures lock and stock, as well as its raison detre...
In submitting to the elemental force of language, or to the voice of the Muse, Brodsky believed that a poet should try to please not his contemporaries or his descendants but his predecessors. (Hemingway had said that every great writer competed only with the dead.) Those predecessors whose names appear in these essays belonged to the Russian and Polish tradition. Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Rilke and W H Auden have a special place in the non-Slavic tradition.
The essay On Grief and Reason is a consideration of the poetry of Robert Frost. To Brodsky, Frost was a major figure in American poetry; he extols his greatness as a poet; he does not inquire about his shortcomings as a human being. For aesthetics precedes ethics. Ninety Years Later is a close reading of Rilkes Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes, the greatest work of the century and Wooing the Inanimate: Four Poems (a fond appreciation of Thomas Hardy which is wrapped up with a memoir on Stephen Spender).
For Brodsky poetry was always a dialogue across centuries as he conversed with Horace and Ovid in Russian translation. He preferred Ovid because of his rich imagery, but Horace challenged him by the great variety of his metrical stanzas. Brodsky believed that the disappearance of Latin from school curricula roughly corresponded in time to the rise of the so-called free verse, with grave consequences for some countries. For instance, after the French metrical poet, Paul Valery, poetry from France disappeared from the book market. For Brodsky, phonetics and semantics were inseparable; that is why he has no kind words for modernism which he believed was largely responsible for the disappearance of meter and rhyme.
Brodskys fondness for the English language comes through again and again in these essays. In An Immodest Proposal for the future of poetry, he said that no other language accumulates as much poetry as does English. To be born into it or to arrive in it is the best boon that can befall man. To prevent its keepers from full access to it is an anthropological crime and thats what the present distribution amounts to.
Brodskys mastery over English is astounding and the result of a truly titanic labour. Again and again you would ask yourself how it was possible for a man, who never even finished high school, to become an authority recognised by scholars trained in the humanities. There must have been an acute awareness of the relationship between words and things that comes from learning two and more languages. All Central Europeans have this gift to some degree but Brodsky is the master of them all only Joseph Conrad, who too learned English at a late stage, comes anywhere near him.
But it is to his native Russian poets that he goes back again and again. In these pages, he builds a bridge to the poetry of his predecessors, Mandelstam (a poet of culture), Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and others over a span of decades when isms dictated the terms of discourse: Marxism, Leninism, Sovietism, Stalinism. In his Nobel Lecture, Uncommon Visage, Brodsky said there were three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that is known to biblical prophets: revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily towards the second and the third). For Brodsky, only the second and third categories mattered in literature; he had no time for other voices or to enter into polemics with an adversary who wasnt worth it. Probably that is why these essays are models of elegant prose that will be read for many decades to come.
Brodsky describes the aristocracy of the mind, exile and homelessness and the ghostly, fantastical world of Stalins Russia
"No language accumulates as much poetry as does English... To arrive in it is the best boon that can befall a man"