Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996)

Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, told to leave and take his language with him. He arrived in the United States at thirty-two, was given a position at the University of Michigan, and spent the rest of his life writing Russian poetry and English essays with equal mastery — a bilingual achievement so rare it constitutes its own argument about what language is.

His essays in English are written in a prose that is visibly translated from Russian thought: denser, more formally intricate, more willing to hold a paradox without resolving it than most English prose allows itself to be. He understood exile not as deprivation but as clarity — as the condition that strips away the peripheral and forces the writer to address only what is essential.

He received the Nobel Prize in 1987 for "an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity." He served as United States Poet Laureate in 1991. He died at fifty-five.

He gave his Nobel Lecture (1987) in Russian, the language he had been exiled from. In it he names the poets who never stood where he stood: Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Frost, Akhmatova, Auden. Read it in English at NobelPrize.org.