Books
FOUR POLISH POETS
TO URANIA: SELECTED POEMS. By Joseph Brodsky. Farrar,
Straus
&
Giroux. $14.95.
AN AGE AGO: A SELECTION OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY
RUSSIAN POETRY. Translated by Alan Myers with a Foreword
by Joseph Brodsky. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $19.95.
Stockholm's limelight has dimmed, and now Joseph Brodsky faces
the usual tribulation of a recently-crowned Nobel laureate: the critical recep–
tion of his first new book published after the Prize. Besides death and taxes,
the third most certain thing in life is the ritual Nobelist-bashing. You can bet
your life's savings that more than one critic will approach Brodsky's newest
book with a single intent in mind: to prove by its example that something's
wrong with the Nobel Prize. Others, who might have sympathized with the
poet's striving for greatness before, will now look upon him with the kind of
automatic suspicion that rises in us whenever someone's greatness has been
officially certified. Still, being bashed may be less upsetting than being smoth–
ered with mass-media praise, all those endlessly repeated cliches about a
Russian boy who made good in America - stereotypes heaped upon stereo–
types and derived for the most part not from studying Brodsky's work but
from reading other newspapers' stories about him. I am sure that Brodsky
himself will take all this in stride, but it would not hurt if at least some critics
approached his new books without the anti-Nobel or pro-Nobel bias and ap–
preciated the fact that, apart from all the laurels and dinners with the Swedish
king, he is that rare gift: a poet who tells us important things in a way only
he can.
Brodsky's originality stems in large part from his art of exploiting the
unique background ofcrisscrossing traditions that lie behind him. A poet who
now belongs to both Russian and American literatures and who, in his
Leningrad years, grew up on a mixed diet of the Russian nineteenth- and
twentieth-century classics, the English tradition (i'om Donne to Auden , and
modern Polish poetry, cou ld not help but make generative comparisons,
choices, and combinations throughout his career. A prominent thread in this
fabric of traditions - one abou t which Brodsky has not written explicitly very
