19/03/2023
Brodsky’s Nobel lecture - post 4/4
✳️ On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky was put onto plane to Vienna by plaincloth KGB officers. A non-conformist alien in a totalitarian USSR he immediately found his place and role in free world. He has been Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of MacArthur Foundation’s award for his works of “genius”. In 1986 a collection of Brodsky’s essays on the arts and politics won the National Book Critic’s Award for Criticism.
In 1987 Joseph Brodsky was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature - “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity”. He delivered his Nobel lecture in Russian, with an authorized English translation.
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“There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the Biblical prophets, revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or on alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I guess, what they call a poet.”
