Classic Poetry and Famous Poets

Biography of Joseph Brodsky 

Joseph Brodsky (1940 - 1996) was born in 1940, in Leningrad, and began writing poetry when he was eighteen. Anna Akhmatova soon recognized in the young poet the most gifted lyric voice of his generation. From March 1964 until November 1965, Brodsky lived in exile in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia; he had been sentenced to five years in exile at hard labor for "social parasitism," but did not serve out his term. Four of Brodsky's poems were published in Leningrad anthologies in 1966 and 1967, but most of his work has appeared only in the West. He is a splendid poetic translator and has translated into Russian, among others, the English metaphysical poets, and the Polish emigre poet, Czeslaw Milosz. His own poetry has been translated into at least ten languages. Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems was published by Penguin Books in London (1973), and by Harper & Row in New York (1974), translated by George L. Kline and with a foreword by W.H. Auden. A volume of Brodsky's selected poems translated in French has been published by Gallimard; a German translation, by Piper Verlag; and an Italian translation, by Mondadori and Adelphi. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published Brodsky's acclaimed collection, A Part of Speech, in 1980. On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky became an involuntary exile from his native country. After brief stays in Vienna and London, he came to the United States. He has been Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. He currently is Five College Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's award for his works of "genius". In 1986, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published Less Than One, a collection of Mr. Brodsky's essays on the arts and politics, which won the National Book Critic's Award for Criticism. In 1988 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published a collection of his poetry, To Urania, and in 1992 a collection of essays about Venice, Watermark. Joseph Brodsky died on January 28, 1996. This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures.

Poems By Joseph Brodsky
 + View All Poems 


Quotes By Joseph Brodsky
"A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state."

"After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life."

"Bad literature is a form of treason."

"Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family."

"Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul."

"For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language."

"How delightful to find a friend in everyone."

"I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside."

"It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything."

"It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot."

"Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse."

"Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose."

"Man is what he reads."

"No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there-well or poorly."

"Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production."

"Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?"

"Robert Frost's triumph was not being at John Kennedy's inauguration ceremony, but the day when he put the last period on "West-Running Brook.""

"The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed."

"The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie."

"This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising."

"Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets."

"What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness."

"What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence."

"Who included me among the ranks of the human race?"