“Every
individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a
guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.”
– Joseph Brodsky
Born this date in 1940 in Leningrad, Brodsky first started writing at age
15, and getting published by the underground journal Sintakss (Syntax)
before he was out of high school. Those
early works got him in deep trouble with both Stalin and his successor Nikita Khrushchev
as being “anti-Soviet,” and by his late 20s he had been jailed, “confined”
to a mental institution, and finally expelled from his
homeland. Luckily for the writing world,
he came to live in the United States thanks to the help of poet W. H. Auden.
From that point until his death in 1996, he
taught writing and poetry at many different U.S. universities, including such
institutions as Yale, Columbia and Michigan before becoming a full-time faculty
member at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.
In 1987, Brodsky was awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued
with clarity of thought and poetic intensity.” And in 1991, he was appointed
United States Poet Laureate, the first naturalized citizen to be so honored.
He said
coming to America was the best thing that could have happened to him. After living under totalitarianism and
oppression, America was a breath of fresh air that renewed his spirit and
belief in his fellow human beings. “Cherish your human connections: your
relationships with friends and family,” he advised his students. “Know
how delightful it is to find a friend in
everyone you meet.”
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