Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-31T19:52:28.418Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Exile, Elegy, and Auden in Brodsky's “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David M. Bethea
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

During the last three decades the in memoriam genre has come to occupy pride of place in the work of the exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. Through his belatedness (which is not necessarily Bloomian), his permanent exile status at the edges of two empires, and his profound poetic speculations on death as the ultimate border crossing, Brodsky now embodies the elegiac tradition in his homeland as no one has since his high‐modernist precursors, Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. And yet—and herein lies his distinct contribution to Russian verse of this century—Brodsky has constantly sought out other, nonnative precursors to mediate the dead letter of his primary Soviet culture. In “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot” he adopts the “mourning tongue” of Auden's “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” while speaking of the death of Eliot in his own distinctive Russian elegy. In this way, not only does he keep “the death of the poet… from his poems,” he keeps death from the door of his own ailing tradition.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 2 , March 1992 , pp. 232 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Auden, W. H. About the House. New York: Random, 1965.Google Scholar
Auden, W. H. The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden. New York: Random, 1945.Google Scholar
Auden, W. H. Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957. New York: Vintage-Random, 1975.Google Scholar
Auden, W. H. The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays. New York: Random, 1948.Google Scholar
Auden, W. H. “Letter of Introduction.” C. Day Lewis, the Poet Laureate: A Bibliography. Comp. G. Handley-Taylor and Timothy d'Arch Smith. London: St. James, 1968. v–vi.Google Scholar
Bethea, David M. “Mandelstam, Pasternak, Brodsky: Judaism and Christianity in the Making of a Modernist Poetics.” American Scholars on Twentieth Century Russian Literature. Ed. Boris Averin and Elizabeth Neatour. Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel', forthcoming.Google Scholar
Harold, Bloom. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.Google Scholar
Ralph, Blum. “A Reporter at Large: Freeze and Thaw: The Artist in Soviet Russia—III.” New Yorker 11 Sept. 1965: 168–217.Google Scholar
Joseph, Brodsky. “The Art of Poetry XXVIII: Joseph Brodsky.” With Sven Birkerts. Paris Review 83 (1982): 83–126.Google Scholar
Joseph, Brodsky. “The Condition We Call Exile.” New York Review of Books 21 Jan. 1988: 18.Google Scholar
Joseph, Brodsky. Interview. With Bengt Jangfeldt. Expressen 3 Apr. 1987.Google Scholar
Joseph, Brodsky. Less Than One: Selected Essays. New York: Farrar, 1986.Google Scholar
Joseph, Brodsky. “The Muse in Exile: Conversations with the Russian Poet, Joseph Brodsky.” With Anne-Marie Brumm. Mosaic 8 (1974): 229–46.Google Scholar
Joseph, Brodsky. О&ccy;тановка в пы&ccy;тынэ [A Halt in the Desert]. New York: Chekhov, 1970.Google Scholar
Joseph, Brodsky. Selected Poems. Trans. George Kline. New York: Harper, 1973.Google Scholar
Joseph, Brodsky. Telephone interview. 14 Feb. 1990.Google Scholar
Edward, Callan. Auden: A Carnival of Intellect. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Humphrey, Carpenter. W. H. Auden: A Biography. London: Allen, 1981.Google Scholar
de Man, Paul. “Lyric Voice in Contemporary Theory: Riffaterre and Jauss.” Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism. Ed. Hosek, Chaviva and Parker, Patricia. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 55–72.Google Scholar
“За&ccy;эданиэ &ccy;ыда Джэпжин&ccy;кого пайона гопода Лэнингпада” [A Session of the Court of the Dzherzhinsky District of the City of Leningrad] (Russian-language transcript of Brodsky's trial). Воэдышныэ пыти [Aerial Ways] 4 (1965): 279–303.Google Scholar
Samuel, Hynes. The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.Google Scholar
Gerald, Janecek. “Comments on Brodskij's ‘Stixi na smert’ T. S. Eliota.'” Russian Language Journal 34 (1980): 145–53. (Rpt. in Поэтика Бпод&ccy;кого: &Ccy;бопник &ccy;татэй [The Poetics of Brodsky: A Collection of Articles]. Ed. L. V. Loseff. Tenafly: Hermitage, 1986. 172–84.)Google Scholar
Frank, Kermode. An Appetite for Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Knox, Jane E. “Iosif Brodskij's Affinity with Osip Mandel'ŝtam: Cultural Links with the Past.” Diss. U of Texas, 1978.Google Scholar
Mikhail, Kreps. О поээии Ио&ccy;ифа Бпод&ccy;кого [On the Poetry of Joseph Brodsky]. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984.Google Scholar
Harry, Levin. “Literature and Exile.” Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1966. 62–81.Google Scholar
Lawrence, Lipking. The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.Google Scholar
The Literature of Exile. Spec. issue of Mosaic 8.3 (1975).Google Scholar
Lev, Loseff. “Iosif Brodskii's Poetics of Faith.” Aspects of Modern Russian and Czech Literature: Selected Papers of the Third World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies. Ed. McMillin, Arnold. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. 188–201.Google Scholar
Osip, Mandelstam. The Complete Critical Prose and Letters. Ed. Harris, Jane Gary. Trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979.Google Scholar
Osip, Mandelstam. &Ccy;обпаниэ &ccy;очинэний [Collected Works]. Ed. Gleb Struve and Boris Filipoff. Vol. 2. Washington: Inter-lang. Lit. Assocs., 1972.Google Scholar
Mendelson, Edward. Preface. W. H. Auden, Selected Poems: New Edition. New York: Vintage-Random, 1979. Rpt. as “Auden's Revision of Modernism.” W. H. Auden. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 111–19.Google Scholar
Czeslaw, Milosz. “Notes on Exile.” “Writer” 281–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anatolii, Naiman. Ра&ccy;&ccy;каэы о Аннэ Ахматовой [Stories about Anna Akhmatova]. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1989.Google Scholar
Charles, Osborne. W. H. Auden: The Life of a Poet. New York: Harcourt, 1979.Google Scholar
Valentina, Polukhina. Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Said, Edward W. “The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile.” Harper's Sept. 1984: 49–55.Google Scholar
Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Stephanie, Sandler. Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Scherr, Barry P. Russian Poetry: Meter, Rhythm, and Rhyme. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.Google Scholar
Michael, Seidel. Exile and the Narrative Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.Google Scholar
“The Trial of Iosif Brodsky” (English-language transcript of Brodsky's trial). New Leader 31 Aug. 1964: 6–17.Google Scholar
Joseph, Wittlin. “Sorrow and Grandeur of Exile.” Polish Review 2.2–3 (1957): 99–111.Google Scholar
Wright, George T. W. H. Auden. New York: Twayne, 1969.Google Scholar
“The Writer in Exile.” Spec. sec. of Books Abroad 50.2 (1976): 271–328.Google Scholar