Joseph Brodsky came of age in the Soviet Union during the "Thaw" period (late 1950s to early 1960s), and he has been widely recognized as the most gifted Russian poet of his generation. He is the direct successor to an illustrious quartet of modernist Russian poets who reached maturity during the pre-Soviet era and later suffered severely under Soviet rule: Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, Osip Emil'evich Mandel'shtam, Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, and Boris Leonidovich Pasternak. The works and lives of these poets, among others, strongly influenced Brodsky's poetics and conditioned his fidelity to the Russian bardic tradition--of which he was, perhaps, the last true practitioner. Throughout his years living in emigration in the United States, Brodsky measured his own poetic merit against the reflections of fellow Soviet émigré poets who also distanced themselves from the overbearing Soviet state machine. At the same time he drew upon the Anglo-American...