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roots in the nineteenth century, he makes, for a Russian poet, very fastidious
choices: he rejects the overwhelming Russian tradition of sentimental
"consolation" clothed in conventional imagery and songlike mellifluousness,
and instead prefers anything that has to do with the restless intellectual's
metaphysical, cognitive, and ethical dramas. In his own poetry, this prefer–
ence is reflected mainly in the semantic ambiguity and tension that result
from the constant clash between the spontaneity of colloquial speech and the
discipline of highly complex and conspicuous formal restraints. In that sense,
Brodsky owes a great deal to nineteenth-century poetry, but only to its spe–
cific and, in Russia, rather atypical undercurrent. He is indebted a great deal
more to the much earlier school of seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry,
which never made its mark in his native literature and which he appropriated
on Russia's behalf from the English tradition. Ironically, his own strikingly
modern lyricism, compared to which all the Yevtushenkos and Voznesenskys
seem not to have gone very far away from Nekrasov, could not have been
born if not for the twentieth-century experience, but it also owes its existence
to the seventeenth-century art of conceit, "felt thought," paradoxical contrast,
and dialogic imagination. Thus, his work appears a high-wire act of balancing
between two seemingly incompatible tasks: it singlehandedly propels Russian
poetry
into the late twentieth century while also substituting for an entire bloc
of tradition absent in the Russian cultural past.
AT.
S. Eliot or perhaps W. H.
Auden of Eastern Europe, Brodsky is also the John Donne Russian poetry
never had.
This obvious truth is repeatedly confirmed by the poems included in
To
Urania,
Brodsky's fourth collection in English but only the second in which he
is responsible for both selection and most of the translations. Just as the ear–
lier
A Part oj Speech,
the present selection is representative of the entire
course of Brodsky's career, fi-om works written in Russia in the 1960s to
new poems composed on Western soil and (with the exception of those
written originally in English) collected in his most recent Russian volume,
Urania.
This broad chronological and geographic frame contains a rich vari–
ety of genres, modes, and approaches - from a mock funeral elegy ("To a
Friend: in Memoriam") and love lyrics ("Polonaise:
A
Variation," "Seven
Strophes") to political philippics (''The Berlin Wall Tune," "Lines on the
Winter Campaign"), a fantastic parable with satirical overtones (''The New
Jules Verne"), and a metaphysical treatise ("The Fly") - but also an amaz–
ingly consistent vision and style. The formal key to the implicit philosophy of
Brodsky's poetry seems to be the ever-present tension between the sponta–
neous, fluid, utterly conversational syntax and nonrestrictive vocabulary on
the one hand, and, on the other, the highly regular and complicated patterns
of rhyme, meter, and stanza, whose level of technical difficulty reaches the
