Since 1972 Iosif Brodsky, the most talented Russian poet of his generation, has been living in the United States. When some forty years ago Auden (whom Brodsky knew and admired) made a similar choice, the implications for him were scarcely so grave as for a Russian poet today…. [Auden's] ears were not constantly assailed by a foreign language; he could not know the dread of being estranged from the native hearth, and of gradually losing touch with what Mandelstam once called "the formidable and boundless element of the Russian language", and with the creative processes at work in popular speech.

Mandelstam is particularly relevant here, because of all Brodsky's predecessors in that generation—and he has learnt much at various times from Tsvetaeva, Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky—none stands closer to him…. For Brodsky as for Mandelstam there can be no question of the poet's authority. He explains in one...