Joseph Brodsky
Influences

Librarian of Congress Dr James Billington, wrote:

He was the favored protégé of the great lady of Petersburg, Anna Akhmatova, and to hear him read her poems in Russian in the Library of Congress was an experience to make one's hair stand on end even if one did not understand the Russian language. Joseph Brodsky was the embodiment of the hopes not only of Anna Akhmatova, the last of the great Petersburg poets from the beginning of the century, but also Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of another great martyred poet Osip Mandelstam. Both of them saw Joseph as part of the guiding light that might some day lead Russia back to her own deep roots.

Brodsky also was deeply influenced by the English metaphysical poets from John Donne to Auden. Many works were dedicated to other writers such as Tomas Venclova, Octavio Paz, Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, and Benedetta Craveri.

Brodsky's work is seen to have been vitally enhanced by the work of renowned translators. A Part of Speech (New York and Oxford, 1980), his second major collection in English, includes translations by Anthony Hecht, Howard Moss, Derek Walcott, and Richard Wilbur. Critic and poet Henri Cole notes that Brodsky's "own translations have been criticized for turgidness, lacking a native sense of musicality."

After the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, Brodsky's controversial poem On the Independence of Ukraine (Russian: На независимость Украины) from the early 1990s (which he did not publish but publicly recited) was repeatedly picked up by state-affiliated Russian media and declared Poem of the Year. The Estate of Joseph Brodsky was subsequently prosecuting some websites publishing the poem, demanding its removal.
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