Brodsky, Joseph (1940-1996), was a poet and essayist who won the 1987 Nobel Prize in literature. He was born on May 20, 1940, in Leningrad in the Soviet Union (now St. Petersburg, Russia) and came to the United States in 1972. Brodsky was appointed poet laureate of the United States for 1991-1992, becoming the country’s first foreign-born poet laureate.
Brodsky wrote in Russian and English. His poems deal primarily with the absence of home, the passage of time, solitude, individual memory, and close observation of everyday places and things. They are known for a musical intensity created by sounds and long sentences continuing across traditional meters and stanzas. Some of Brodsky’s poems were collected in A Part of Speech (1980) and So Forth (published in 1996, after his death). Some of Brodsky’s essays were collected in Less Than One (1986).
While living in the Soviet Union, Brodsky learned English so he could translate the works of the English poet John Donne. One of Brodsky’s most famous poems is “Great Elegy for John Donne” (1967). In 1964, the Soviet government labeled Brodsky a social parasite for writing poetry instead of having a “useful” occupation. He was imprisoned for 18 months and in 1972 was forced to leave the country. Brodsky became a U.S. citizen in 1977. He died on Jan. 28, 1996.
