JOSEPH BRODSKY
Wooing the Inanimate
(Four Poems by Thomas Hardy)
I
A decade or so ago, a prominent English critic, reviewing in an Ameri–
can magazine a collection of poems by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney,
remarked that that poet's popularity in Britain, in its academic circles
particularly, is indicative of the English public's stolid reading tastes, and
that for all the prolonged physical presence of Messieurs Eliot and Pound
on British soil, modernism never took root in England. The latter part
of his remark (certainly not the former, since in that country - not to
mention that milieu - where everyone wishes the other worse off, malice
amounts to an insurance policy) got me interested, for it sounded both
wistful and convincing.
Shortly afterward, I had the opportunity to meet that critic in per–
son, and although one shouldn't talk shop at the dinner table, I asked
him why he thinks modernism fared so poorly in his country. He replied
that the generation of poets which could have wrought the decisive
change was wiped out in the Great War. I found this answer a bit too
mechanistic, considering the nature of the medium, too Marxist, if you
will - subordinating literature too much to history. But then the man
was a critic, and that's what critics do.
I thought that there must have been another explanation - if not
for the fate of modernism on that side of the Atlantic, then for the ap–
parent viability of formal verse there at the present time. Surely there are
plenty of reasons for that, obvious enough to discard the issue alto–
gether. The sheer pleasure of writing or reading a memorable line would
be one; the purely linguistic logic of, and need for, meter and rhyme is
another. But nowadays one's mind is conditioned to operate cir–
cuitously, and at the time, I thought only that a good rhyme is what in
the end saves poetry from becoming a demographic phenomenon. At the
time , my thoughts went to Thomas Hardy.
Perhaps I wasn't thinking so circuitously, after all, or at least not yet.
Perhaps the expression "Great War" triggered something in my memory,
and I remembered Thomas Hardy's "After two thousand years of Mass /
We got as far as poison gas." In that case, my thinking was still straight.
Or was it perhaps the term "modernism" that triggered those thoughts.
Editor's Note: Excerpted from ON GRIEF AND REASON: Essays by Joseph Brodsky,
to
be
published by Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. Copyright
©
1995 by Joseph Brodsky. All rights reserved.
