Saturday, June 24, 2017

Joseph Brodsky, Jewish Poet



 “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” 
Joseph Brodsky Jewish Poet

'A Russian newspaper declared that his poetry was “pornographic and anti-Soviet.” The authorities were worried because he was becoming so popular and his readings were attracting large, enthusiastic crowds. He was interrogated, he was put in a mental institution, and then he was arrested. His trial was in secret, but the transcript was smuggled out, and his defense of the right to be a poet made him a hero, especially in the United States and Europe. He was sentenced to five years in a labor camp in Siberia, but there was so much protest that his sentence was commuted after a year and a half. For the next few years he continued to write, but he was harassed and finally expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972. Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity".He was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1991.

I was only that which
you touched with your palm
over which, in the deaf, raven-black
night, you bent your head...
I was practically blind.
You, appearing, then hiding,
taught me to see.[ 8 ]





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