SOURCE: "Poet Laureate on Mission to Supermarket's Masses," in The New York Times, December 10, 1991, p. B15.

In the following essay, De Witt discusses Brodsky's appointment to U.S. poet laureate, focusing in particular on Brodsky's belief that poetry should be published much more widely.

Small and balding, wisps of light hair straggling across his scalp, Joseph Brodsky hunkered down on a balcony step outside the poetry office in the attic of the Library of Congress. Absent-mindedly he gazed through his cigarette's smoke and the balcony's balustrade at the Capitol where a group of gay activists were protesting.

"Look," he recently commanded a visitor, standing up and peering south at the horizon. "Too late. There was a plane, the sun shining on it like a rocket."

Mr. Brodsky is the first foreign-born poet laureate of the United States, but if one expected probings into the capital's consciousness or weighty...