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that we'll not meet in Heaven
or be neighbors in Hell.
VICTOR ERLICH
Clearly, what is proposed here is stoicism rather than secularism. Brodsky's
hankering after a religious sense of the world is quite apparent. Yet religion
toward which he reaches is not a source of comfort, of easy solace, but a mode
of transcendence. Nor is Brodsky's vaunted "metaphysical" thrust a matter of
downgrading, let alone escaping, the merely physical. He shares with many
post-Symbolist poets the delight in the concrete and the immediate, in what].
C. Ransom has called "the world's body." Wary as he is of man as a social
animal, he places more trust in "things" ("Things are more pleasant"), in the
sensory detail affectionately repossessed and recreated by the artist:
It seems that art strives for us to be
precise and not to tell us lies because
its fundamental law undoubtedly'
asserts the independence
of
detall . .
(One is reminded ofthe early Pasternak's celebration ofthe "Omnipotent god of
detail, the omnipotent god of love"). One of the highpoints of Brodsky's early
period, the remarkable "Elegy for John Donne" (1962) characteristically is in
large part a cumulative evocation of the material underpinnings of Donne's
universe from his immediate physical environment ("walls, bed and floor. . .
the pictures, carpet, hooks and bolts") to "this island. . . embraced by lonely
dreams." The organic bond between imagination and actuality, the inter–
penetration of poetry and nature is one of the themes in the finely wrought
and richly orchestrated tribute to another English master, "Verses on the
Death ofT. S. Eliot" (1965).
In
its intricate metrical structure Brodsky's poem
is patterned after W. H. Auden's classic "In Memory of W. B. Yeats (d.
January 1939)."
It
is remarkable that such a full-throated homage to Eliot's
achievement should have come from a proscribed Russian poet, stranded in
the snows of Arkhangelsk.
Wood and field will not forget
All that lives will know you yet
As the body holds in mind
Lost caress
of
lips and arms. .
It
should be apparent by now that Brodsky's mode of concreteness b
more akin to Wallace Stevens's than to William Carlos Williams's. Brodsky
shares with the former an active concern with the complex relationship be–
tween language and reality, between words and things, and more broadly, a
pronounced intellectual, though never merely cerebral, bent.
In
many of his
