PARTISAN REVIEW
That I whose soberness of style was classic
would balance on the thin edge of a knife.
I
have voyaged with honor my course: due North.
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Only once.in a sardonic "To a Certain Poetess" does a statement of the
speaker's plight become curtly explicit. "So let us call it quits: I've lost my
freedom."
Clearly,Brodsky's muse is short on self-pity. Interestingly enough, the
theme of ostracism as the poet's essential condition-a motif wider and more
pervasive than that of the short-term rigors of the Arkhangelsk exile-is
sounded in a poem written
prior
to Brodsky's exile:
You are coming home again. What does it mean?
Can there be anyone here who still needs you?
Who still wants to count you as his friend?
. .
le's fine to walk alone in this vast world
Toward home from the tumultuous railroad station.
Is this a prefiguration of the speaker's impending plight or is it rather an
evocation of a predicament of which Brodsky's actual travail in 1964-5 was
merely, in the phrase of one of his favorite poets, an appropriately grim
"objective correlative"?
Actually, in Brodsky's view, the real issue is still larger. The situation of
the independent-minded poet in the Soviet Union appears here as an ex–
treme variant of the creative individual's status in
any
society; presumably the
social rewards of poetic vision range from harassment to indifference. "A
writer," Brodsky wrote in a revealing statement, "is a lonely traveler, and no
one is his helper"
(New York Times Magazine,
October
1,
1972).
Born into a culture which had reduced the millennial elan of radical
Russian intelligentsia to a bleakly authoritarian dogma, Brodsky has an in–
stinctive loathing of .utopian thinking and scant enthusiasm for the more
moderate modes of political meliorism. (In his
New Statesmen
review of
Selected
Poems
Stephen Spender said with a fine touch of liberal self-irony: "Every–
thing you would like him to think he does not think.") "Today's humanity's
choice," he maintained in the already quoted
New York Times
article, "lies not
between Good and Evil but between Bad and Worse." Hence the high pre–
mium placed here on "personal fortitude," on being able to face unblinkingly
the essential untractability of human experience, the finality of loss and sep–
aration :
Our farewell's the more final
since we both are aware
