Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Judge: And what is your occupation in general? Brodsky: Poet, poet-translator. Judge: And who recognized you to be a poet? Who put… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
I was quite happy in Arkhangelsk.Subsequently, I was sent to a village. I liked it in its own way because it sounded… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable,… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced... I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice.… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse,… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture and the people. They've been stolen from the people and… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Literature sort of makes your daily operation, your daily conduct, the management of your affairs in the society a bit more complex.… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.' — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
“In the business of writing, what one accumulates is not experience but uncertainties.” — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
I haven't shifted language. I'm writing in English because I like it. I'm a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I'm… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
“What gets left of a man amounts to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech” — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
“The instinctive preference was to read rather than to act. No wonder our actual lives were more or less a shambles” — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
