‘Galatea Encore’

Abstract

’Brodsky, Joseph’, it announces definitively: Russian-born American poet.¹ Dictionaries decimate and encyclopaedias truncate the lives and works of poets, but poets, like statues, invent procedures to avoid the reduction to less than one by time or tome. Poets are changed, not by academic definitions, but (as Mallarme said of Poe) by eternity. Into themselves. Joseph Brodsky’s exploration of the resources of the English language in his own poetry and prose, from the early, and not entirely auspicious, attempt at an ‘Elegy to W. H. Auden’ (1974) to the more assured reflections in the Venetian Watermark (1992), was as much an act of self effacement as it was of self assertion.² Or, rather, it was, to employ one of Brodsky’s own favourite concepts, an amalgam of effacement and assertion; in other words, an unrelenting process of self-discovery, in which the individual poems and prose pieces were the products.