CZESLAW MILOSZ
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Tsvetaeva and Auden. He once said he would be pleased to be called an
epigone of Auden.
Without completely rejecting free verse, he paid a special tribute to
metrical poets: Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Rilke. I have not found in
his pronouncements any favorable mention of another line of English–
language poetry, beginning with Walt Whitman.
As poetry was for him a dialogue across centuries, he conversed with
Horace and Ovid in Russian translations. He preferred Ovid because of
his rich imagery, but Horace challenged him by the great variety of his
metrical stanzas.
For Brodsky, phonetics and semantics were inseparable; that is why
he had no kind words for modernism, which was largely responsible for
the abandonment of meter and rhyme. Reading his essays, one is inclined
to think that a revolution in poetry's form coincides with a phase of civi–
lization characterized by a sudden explosion of numbers and by mass
education. For centuries poetry developed in the presence if not under
the influence of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. The disappearance of Latin
from school curricula roughly corresponds, in time, to the rise of so–
called free verse, with grave consequences in some countries. After the
last metrical French poet, Paul Valery, poetry in France gradually faded
from the book market. Brodsky's fondness for the English language
probably had something to do with its more muscular nature, enabling it
to create new formal rigors after the end of Victorian rhymed verse.
Joseph
Brodsky
1940-1996
