SOURCE: "The Art of Montale," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXIV, No. 10, June 9, 1977, pp. 35-9.

Brodsky is a Russian poet and critic who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 and became an American citizen in 1977. His view of poetry as a relief from the horrors and absurdities of life and the meaningless vacuum of death has led critics to link him with the modern school of existentialism. In the following excerpt from a review of New Poems, Brodsky notes distinguishing characteristics of Montale's poetry and praises the verse written about his deceased wife.

Ever since the Romantics, we have been accustomed to the biographies of poets whose startling careers were sometimes as short as their contributions; in this context, Montale is a kind of anachronism, and the extent of his contribution to poetry has been anachronistically great. A contemporary of Apollinaire, T. S. Eliot, Mandelstam...