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Joseph Brodsky’s Roman Body

TIMOTHY P. HOFMEISTER

In “Letter to Horace,” an essay published in the year before he died, Joseph Brodsky, or his narra-
tor, describes an erotic dream-encounter with a strange body that resembles a lover’s he once knew
in Rome. This body represents Roman poetry, whose appeal lies in its formal excellence and histor-
ical importance, but especially Horace’s, which attracts Brodsky because of its metrical variety. Ho-
race stands out for his power to surprise a reader through the manipulation, or recreation, of lan-
guage. Brodsky’s account of Horace’s poetry (as well as of Virgil’s and Ovid’s) advances a set of
ideas that appear in his other writing: that language issues from the inanimate; that a poet does not
select from language so much as language chooses a poet, “and thereby accomplishes world-his-
torical (evolutionary) goals of its own;” that the fruit of this evolution is beauty; and that lyric po-
etry is “a metaphysical affair whose goal is either accomplishing or liberating one’s soul: winnow-
ing it from the chaff of existence.”

T he body in question—the “Roman body” of Joseph Brodsky—appears in a dream

Brodsky describes in “Letter to Horace,” an essay he wrote in 1995, the year before he
died.1 In the essay, Brodsky addresses Horace as if in an epistle, no Brief an einen jungen
Dichter (Rilke), but instead a letter to a dead poet, except that Horace may not be a dead
poet. In “Letter to Horace,” Brodsky suggests that poets may be reincarnated, in Pytha-
gorean fashion, and that Horace himself had recently returned as W. H. Auden, a mentor
of Brodsky’s. (One might think this is a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, except that a motif of
reincarnation, or of the reformation of matter, already bruited in “Homage to Marcus
Aurelius” [1994], for example, as a universal nature reshaping a universal substance, be-
comes a highly significant theme of “Letter to Horace,” as will be seen later in this essay.)
At minimum, Brodsky insists, poets live on in their work, especially in the meters they
use and the rhythms they create.
In the dream which is the central figure of “Letter to Horace,” Brodsky is making
love with somebody—some body. This body represents the poetry of Horace, his body of
work, but also Roman poetry as a whole, of which Horace’s poems are a choice part, and
so the dream signifies Brodsky’s desire for the body of Roman poetry and of Horace’s po-
etry as well. Brodsky desires to flirt with that poetic body, even to make love or enjoy in-
tercourse with it: to play in its meters and on its favorite themes, and, while indulging his

I would like to thank the editor, Professor Wolfgang Haase, for his consistent helpfulness and
advice, and also an anonymous reader for the Journal who gave generously of his/her keen
insights in a response to an earlier draft of this essay.

1. Brodsky’s “Letter to Horace” appears in his collection of essays, On Grief and Reason (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 428–58. Hereafter, the essay will also (in the footnotes)
be abbreviated as LH.

Timothy P. Hofmeister, Department of Classics, Denisen University, Granville, OH 43023, USA.

International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 12, No. 1, Summer 2005, pp. 81–93.
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82 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Summer 2005

passion yet maintaining a distance, to merge nearly with that body, but not disappear,
and so, in the end, to add to the body of Roman poetry. Brodsky figures poetic imitation
as erotic struggle, in which the poet-as-lover is by turns either secondary or striving for
transcendence. Such is the relation Brodsky traces in “Letter to Horace”—as well as ear-
lier in “Roman Elegies” and “Homage to Marcus Aurelius”—to the classical, i.e., Roman
poets, and to their city, Rome itself. Hence, Joseph Brodsky’s “Roman Body.”
I will return in a moment to Brodsky’s dream and “Letter to Horace.” First, however,
I would like to sketch (briefly) the ideas which Brodsky attempts to tie together in the
essay and which inform his treatment of Horace and certain other Roman poets there.
The dream and the essay as a whole elaborate certain essential themes of Brodsky’s work:
the relationship of a poet to poetic tradition(s), as well as the relation of the poet to lan-
guage, to matter, and to time. Not to mention the soul. No wonder that J. M. Coetzee calls
“Letter to Horace” “the finest essay in the collection” of On Grief and Reason, and one in
which Brodsky’s critical prose “attains new and complex, bittersweet tones.”2
Brodsky’s pursuit of this Roman body signifies the importance of Roman poetry, es-
pecially that of Horace, within a European poetic tradition such as Brodsky conceives it.
As he states in “Letter to Horace,” “. . . when one writes verse, one’s most immediate au-
dience is not one’s own contemporaries, let alone posterity, but one’s predecessors. Those
who gave one a language, those who gave one forms.”3 The matter of language is com-
plicated because Brodsky was a bilingual poet, so that “those who gave one a language”
would entail at once a Russian tradition and an English tradition. “Those who gave one
forms” would involve the same sort of broad tradition of poetry, in Russian and English,
but would also feature Roman poets prominently, and indeed Roman culture as a whole.
The Romans provided Brodsky himself, from his youth, with a feeling for artistic
form. The city where Brodsky grew up, St. Petersburg, was, as Brodsky writes in his
essay on Osip Mandelstam, “the mediastinum” of a Russian “Hellenicism,” i.e., a Hell-
enizing tendency that in fact represented an imagined cultural unity emanating from the
West and, in practice, an “intellectual voracity toward anything coming from that direc-
tion.”4 Just as Mandelstam’s poetry “repeats the development of our civilization,” so the
“Hellenicism” of St. Petersburg was inclusive of all that is classical—Hellenic, Roman,
and Byzantine. As Brodsky put it, “Classicism never had so much room, and the Italian
architects who kept being invited by successive Russian monarchs understood this all too
well.”5 This profound classical exercise deeply impressed Brodsky, no doubt, so that the
sensitivity to architectural form in “Roman Elegies” (not to mention “Homage to Marcus
Aurelius” or Watermark) settles an old debt.
The significance to Brodsky of classical poetic form is revealed in Brodsky’s essay on
Thomas Hardy, when he says that form, or “structuring,” “reflects not so much [Hardy’s]
familiarity with the contemporary scene as . . . his reading of the Greek and Roman clas-
sics.”6 Brodsky notes with approval that Hardy was an autodidact—not surprisingly, see-
ing that Brodsky was one himself. Brodsky also shows an interest in specific poetic forms
that were adopted and developed by Roman poets, a good example being epigram, uti-
lized by Brodsky in “Letters to a Roman Friend,” which he inscribed to Martial.

2. J. M. Coetzee, “Speaking for Language,” The New York Review of Books, XLIII, 2, February 1, 1996, 31.
3. LH 439.
4. Joseph Brodsky, “The Child of Civilization,” in his collection of essays, Less Than One (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 130.
5. Ibid. 131.
6. J. Brodsky, “Wooing the Inanimate,” On Grief and Reason, 321.
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The importance of poetic form reflects a central belief of Brodsky’s that, by means of
form, poetry is capable of “restructuring time.” Coetzee takes Brodsky to task for the ob-
scurity of this notion. It is perhaps true that this “restructuring” is not just a matter of dis-
placing and rearranging time as it is experienced by a reader, by means of meter and
rhythm; as Coetzee says, music does this more effectively than poetry.7 But poetry has
words, while music does not utilize words, at least intrinsically. A poem, as Brodsky puts
it, “is as incurably semantic as it is incurably euphonic.”8 Brodsky insists on the music of
language, and so it is for Horace’s metrical variety in particular that Brodsky values Ho-
race. Horace’s euphonic inventiveness kindles Brodsky’s ardor for the Odes. Brodsky
makes the point in a poignant way when he writes that, if in Hades the language barrier
between himself and Horace should prove insuperable, they might communicate by tap-
ping out asclepiads and sapphics, “like inmates in an institution.”9
The power of poetry to “restructure time” has a diachronic or evolutionary dimension.
In “Letter to Horace,” Brodsky reworks a crucial (and difficult) nexus of ideas which ap-
pear elsewhere in his writing: that language issues from the inanimate; that a poet does not
select from language, but language chooses the poet, “and thereby accomplishes world-
historical (evolutionary) goals of its own,” as Coetzee himself writes;10 that the chief fruit of
evolution is beauty; and, finally, that lyric poetry is “a metaphysical affair whose goal is
either accomplishing or liberating one’s soul: winnowing it from the chaff of existence.”11 It
may seem presumptuous to speak of the soul (though Brodsky often does); one may prefer
the way David MacFadyen summarizes what Brodsky is looking for in (and through) po-
etry: “If there is a base, or basis, to all [of Brodsky’s] switching, wandering, and vagrancy it
is the ongoing search of the finite, physical world for the ineffable Word—the ethical duty
to realize one’s metaphysical potential in the here and now, in preparation for the “there
and then. [. . .] It is the challenging of one’s mathematically inevitable demise at the hands
of linear history by creating a unique and idiosyncratic temporal mosaic, one that is beauti-
ful and therefore improves the future, long after one has left it.”12
MacFadyen’s account of Brodsky’s poetry-making brings us back to Horace, inasmuch
as the image of “a unique and idiosyncratic temporal mosaic” recalls Friedrich Nietz-
sche’s often quoted description of the Odes as a supremely affecting “mosaic of words”:

Up to the present no poet has given me the same artistic raptures as those which
from the first I received from an Horatian ode. In certain languages it would be
absurd even to aspire to what is accomplished by this poet. This mosaic of
words, in which every unit spreads its power to the left and to the right over the

7. Coetzee, 29.
8. J. Brodsky, “An Immodest Proposal,” On Grief and Reason, 207.
9. LH 457. To be sure, Brodsky’s personal experience of the Soviet prison system informs this ref-
erence to the tapping of messages “like inmates in an institution.” Brodsky also uses the con-
dition of prisoners in his play, Marbles (1989), as a metaphor for the confinement of two char-
acters, Tullius and Publius, within a totalitarian future, or alternatively in a restrictive poetic
tradition burdened by the “marbles” of a classical past.
10. Coetzee, 30.
11. J. Brodsky, “Altra Ego,” On Grief and Reason, 87. Compare what Brodsky writes in his intro-
duction to Aleksander Kushner’s Apollo in the Snow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1991), xii: “Poetry is essentially the soul’s search for its release in language.”
12. David MacFadyen, Joseph Brodsky and the Baroque (Montreal and Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 192–193.
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84 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Summer 2005

whole, by its sound, by its placement in the sentence, and by its meaning, this
minimum in the compass and number of the signs, and the maximum of energy in
the signs which is thereby achieved—all of this is Roman, and, if you will be-
lieve me, noble par excellence.13

Nietzsche responds with “rapture” to the extraordinary compass and motility of

signs in the Odes, while MacFadyen praises how Brodsky challenges linear time through
the creation of a poetic mosaic “that is beautiful and therefore improves the future, long
after one has left it.” In the Odes, Horace created an extension of himself into the future,
what Nietzsche calls “the ‘aere perennius’ in style.” While Brodsky never cites Nietzsche’s
famous description in “Letter to Horace,” nevertheless it is clear that for Brodsky the
Odes represent a restructuring of time in that precise sense, namely, of something
uniquely beautiful which participates in the evolutionary goal of language itself and
which thus affects the future more surely and profoundly than a physical monument. In
“Homage to Marcus Aurelius,” Brodsky points out how a monument scarcely departs
from the “horizontality” it shares with “its most frequent subject,” a human being. So
Horace in the capstone ode (III.30), from which Nietzsche quoted “aere perennius,” calls
his poetry a monument higher than the pyramids, “regali situ pyramidum altius,” and pre-
dicts that it will live for as long as the pontifex “with the silent vestal climbs the Capito-
line”—which turned out in fact to be an understatement, as Horace may have intended.
Rome, or at least its imperial practices, reassumed the horizontal before Horace’s poetry.
In truth, poetry can accomplish a reversal of space as well, since that is what Brodsky
calls the body, and poetry makes for Horace a more durable body than the one he ac-
quired at birth. Similarly Brodsky’s “dream” is an extension of reality, achieved through
a response to a prior work of poetic art, or to a body of work, though rendered in a differ-
ent medium, prose. Notwithstanding this difference in form, “Letter to Horace” repre-
sents an opening of the poet’s own self to the opportunity—or necessity, as Brodsky
would probably have it—offered by language, and by its chief accelerator, poetry, to ex-
tend reality and “improve the future.”

Brodsky tells Horace that the dream was precipitated when he read the Odes in bed late
one cold February night. Reading the Odes triggers the recollection of a young woman
Brodsky once knew in Rome. The erotic memory both causes and interacts with the
dream, so I will describe each one briefly. Brodsky recalls that his young Roman “beauty”
had an apartment in the Subura, “bristling with flowerpots but redolent with the smell of
the crumbling paperbacks the place was stuffed with.” The books belong not to the
beauty, but to a neighbor, “an old woman, a widow, who was born and spent her entire

13. “Twilight of the Idols,” as quoted by Joseph Farrell in Latin Language and Latin Culture (Cam-
bridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 115. Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung,
“Was ich den Alten verdanke,” 1 (Werke, eds. Giorgio Colli–Mazzino Montinari, VI, vol. 3
[Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969], 148 f.): “Bis heute habe ich an keinem Dichter dasselbe artistische
Entzücken gehabt, das mir von Anfang an eine Horazische Ode gab. In gewissen Sprachen ist Das, was
hier erreicht ist, nicht einmal zu w o l l e n. Dies Mosaik von Worten, wo jedes Wort als Klang, als Ort,
als Begriff, nach rechts und links und über das Ganze hin seine Kraft ausströmt, dies minimum in Um-
fang und Zahl der Zeichen, dies damit erzielte maximum in der Energie der Zeichen–das Alles ist
römisch und, wenn man mir glauben will, v o r n e h m par excellence.”
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life in Libya, in Leptis Magna.” The paperbacks surround the bed where the young
beauty and Brodsky make love. The poet also recalls “a large, heavily framed mirror
leaning somewhat precariously against a rickety bookshelf right across from the bed, and
at such an angle that whenever I or my tender companion wanted to imitate you, we had
to strain and crane our necks rather desperately. Otherwise the mirror would frame only
more paperbacks. In the early hours it could give one an eerie feeling of being transpar-
ent.” (“To imitate you” refers to the story in the Suetonian vita that Horace’s bed was sur-
rounded with mirrors.)14
So much for the setting of Brodsky’s reminiscence. In the dream that seems to issue
from this recollection, everything stays the same, except that the books are gone, and the
mirror, along with the lover as well. There is still the bed, however, and next to it a “sea-
serpent-like, though extremely dusty radiator.” Here is what transpires in Brodsky’s
“highly carnal” dream:

. . . To condense the entire endeavor into one cameo, my target’s upper torso
would be plunged into the narrow, one-foot-wide trough between the bed and
the radiator, with the tanless rump and me atop it floating at the mattress’s
brink. The bodice’s laced hem would do as foam.

Throughout all this I didn’t see her face. For the above-implied reasons. All
I knew about her was that she was from Leptis Magna, although I have no idea
how I learned this. There was no sound track to this session, nor do I believe we
exchanged two words. If we did, that was before I became cognizant of the
process, and the words must have been in Latin: I have a faint sense of some ob-
stacle regarding our communication. Still, all along I seem to have known, or
else managed to surmise in advance, that there was something of Ingrid Thulin
in the bone structure of her face. Perhaps I espied this when, submerged as she
was under the bed, her right hand now and then, in an awkward backward mo-
tion, groped for the warm coils of that dusty radiator.15

The lover has merged with the widow, the Beloved with the Muse. The books are
gone because they too have merged with the figure that combines beloved and muse; ex-
perience is being transmuted into poetry, and Brodsky is in the process of adding to the
sum of all those crumbling paperbacks. And why is the mirror gone? Brodsky indicates
that the dream is more like metamorphosis, and so no longer merely a reflection, but an
attempt to merge with a Golden Age, a body of poetry which he had pursued over a life-
time of reading.
What more does the elusive body signify, if the image is not simply chic and sala-
cious, like one of the quirky pictures of Guy Bourdin?16 How does that body, and the

14. LH 431.—Cf. Suetonius, De poetis, frg. XXVIII, p. 47 in C. Suetonius Tranquillus, Praeter Cae-
sarum libros reliquiae, ed. A. Reifferscheid (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1860; repr. Hildesheim-New
York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1971), p. 47.
15. LH 435–36.
16. I think especially of an image that appeared in The New York Times (Tuesday, July 15, 2003, Sec-
tion B1) in an article on a group of photography exhibitions in London during that summer—
one was a retrospective of Bourdin’s work. The image I have in mind is of a woman’s lower
body and legs, in red mini-skirt and dress-heels, stretched out on a red couch. That is all one
sees of her, because her torso disappears behind the couch, and into the space between couch
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86 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Summer 2005

“awkward backward motion” of its hand’s groping for the coils of the dusty radiator,
relate to the poetry of Horace? Brodsky identifies the “tanless rump,” the “target” of his
affections in the dream, with Horace’s verse, and strangely enough Brodsky has poetic
metres in mind. Horace’s metrics stand out from the body of Latin poetry just as the tan-
less part of Brodsky’s dream-beauty stands out from the rest of her form, which is terra-
cotta colored and sepia-tinted. Brodsky calls the quality he prizes in Horace’s metres “lo-
gaoedic.” By that term, he seems to mean the assimilation of dactyls (and spondees) to
trochees, which creates an effect of metrical variety or surprise, as opposed to the monot-
ony of the hexameter or the elegiac couplet. The term “logaoedic” also suggests a form of
expression straddling the boundary of poetry and prose—”the verses, having the ap-
pearance of metrical irregularity, partake of the nature of ordinary conversational prose”
(Beck)—a notion that particularly suits Brodsky, for whom the prose essay emerged as a
major creative outlet late in his career. As for expert knowledge of Latin metrics, one as-
sumes Brodsky had none, since he says more than once in the essay, “My Latin stinks.”
(Brodsky mentions that he is reading the Odes in a Russian translation, and whether or not
that translation happened to reproduce at all closely the metres of Horace, I do not know.)
Horace’s meters forestall routine, while those of Virgil, e.g., are too predictable, and
repetitious—every bit as much as reality itself. The right hand of the lover, which reaches
awkwardly for the radiator, represents an unfortunate wish to submit to the monotonous
rhythm of the hexameter—what Horace does in his other poetry, Brodsky complains,
whereas in the Odes, Horace strains instead for the unexpected, rhythmically speaking,
and so retains the power to surprise a reader.
To identify an example of this kind of surprise in the poems of Horace, one need only
turn to the poem which Brodsky highlights in “Letter to Horace,” the Valgius ode (2.9). In
that poem, for instance, Horace uses enjambment in the third stanza to emphasize the
placement of Mysten ademptum: “tu semper urges flebilibus modis/Mysten ademptum.” Or
take an example from another poem, the ode to Postumus (2.14), which Brodsky seems to
favor, inasmuch as he alludes to it extensively in “Letters to a Roman Friend.” In the
penultimate stanza of the ode, the word “uxor,” which is the complement of the adjective
“placens,” is delayed:

Linquenda tellus et domus et placens

uxor [.]

Whether or not a Roman reader would have expected anything other than “wife” at the
end of that ascending series, “You will have to leave behind your grounds and your
house and your pleasing/wife” (not to mention what Postumus expected), one can be al-

and wall. The similarity to the figure in Brodsky’s dream is striking. I do not want to press the
comparison, however, but only to acknowledge a marked feature of Brodsky’s style in the
essay “Letter to Horace” that is typified not just by the voyeuristic quality of the dream, but
also in the repeated references to film and the movies—e.g., James Mason, Anthony Perkins,
Ingrid Thulin. The erotic is not the salient feature, or not the only one, but rather the mixing of
high and low, a free-ranging attitude that conveys a certain tone and a certain Euro-American
intellectual style, a kind of Sontag-strut, even as Brodsky is discussing the “pearls of Horace.”
This is redolent of what Derek Walcott says of Brodsky’s approach to the classics, “He chews
and swallows the past audibly . . . but of course this vulgarity is an act” (“Magic Industry,”
in Walcott’s collection of essays, What the Twilight Says [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1998], 140).
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most sure what Brodsky would have been waiting for—“girl,” “darling,” or the like—
and what pleasure he obtained when that expectation was overturned by the surprise
of “uxor.”
Horace may indeed be capable of producing more subtle effects by means of rhythm
and structure than Brodsky gives him credit for—not that Horace does not also create
surprise by manipulating sense in other ways.17 Brodsky claims to be flattered that Horace
mentions “Geloni” and “mare Caspium” in his poem to Valgius, and this is not entirely a
joke. But Brodsky winds up by saying that Horace wanders north in this poem just to say
“Gelonos” and “Caspium” for the sake of another addressee than Valgius, namely, Augus-
tus, whom Horace seeks to gratify by means of geography. In this way, Brodsky suggests,
the “Geloni” become an emblem of the limits of Horace’s imagination. However, Horace’s
reference to the Geloni, and his handling of form in this poem, is more expressive than
Brodsky explicitly acknowledges. The Alcaic stanza tapers in the fourth line, and so the
poem to Valgius narrows at its end, until the Geloni are trapped inside bounds that are
shaped formally and metrically—exiguis equitare campis. But the reference may not be to
Scythian horsemen so much as to certain poets who are Horace’s contemporaries, in par-
ticular elegiac poets, even Valgius himself, in whose case the constriction of poetic limits
finally produces tedium: “tu semper urges flebilibus modis/Mysten ademptum.” By contrast,
a poet like Horace is able to turn “limits” into a virtue—a logaoedic poet, that is, as Brod-
sky calls Horace.18
None of this flatters Virgil, at least initially. The radiator reminds Brodsky of Roman
poetry of the hexametric type, its serpent-like coils representing, it would seem, the ser-
pents who crushed Laocoon and his sons just as utterly as monotone reality overwhelms
every living thing. But there is a side of Virgil which Brodsky admires, not the poet of the
Aeneid, but of the Bucolics and in particular the Georgics. Brodsky likes the neutrality of
the poetic voice in the Georgics, and the meticulous way the poet “has itemized the
world.” According to Brodsky, it is the absence of fiction which echoes “time’s own per-
spective” on existence. If time should have “pen of its own and decide to compose a
poem,” Brodsky says, “its lines would include leaves, grass, earth, wind, sheep, horses,
trees, cows, bees. But not us. Maximum, our souls.”19 The poet performs at least two im-

17. Brodsky does not attribute to euphony all of Horace’s ability to surprise. Speaking at one point
in the voice of Horace’s Greek lyric predecessors, Brodsky says, “Yeah, we’re impressed.
That’s why your lines are so twisted with enjambments and qualifiers, that’s why your argu-
ment is so unpredictable” (LH 440). One should not assume, having read in “Roman Elegies”
the phrase, “cold pearls of Horace,” that Brodsky failed to see that Horace knew, like Thomas
Hardy, how to “roughen” a line in order to impart to the poetic argument an unpredictable
turn. Such roughening appears in 3.6, the last Roman ode, when Horace anticipates the good
offices of the institor in the seduction of the young Roman wife. The invocation of Libitina in
the great capstone ode, 3.30, is another such stroke. There is also a superb example in 4.13:
“Quid habes illius, illius,/quae spirabat amores,/quae me surpuerat mihi . . .?” (“What do you still
retain of that one, that one who breathed love itself, who stole me from myself?”) The collo-
quialism of surpuerat represents a shift from formal diction, as if the speaker were to shed pom-
posity for a moment, becoming least himself, i.e. his public self, and thus vulnerable, even in
addressing that old love, Lyce.
18. For a different reading of the structure of the final two stanzas of 2.9, see Ellen Oliensis, Horace
and the Rhetoric of Authority (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
113–14.
19. LH 447.
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88 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Summer 2005

portant tasks, that is, to enumerate the details of reality without egocentricity, and so
without distortion, and at the same time to discern the ways in which the human soul
threads itself through the material world. Virgil accomplished the first task, and the sec-
ond as well, with some regularity:

Whether he talks of plants or planets, soils or souls, the deeds and/or destinies
of the men of Rome, his close-ups are both blinding and binding; but so are
things themselves, dear Flaccus, aren’t they? No, your friend was no atomist, no
epicurean; nor was he a stoic. If he believed in any principle, it was life’s regen-
eration, and his Georgics’ bees are no better than those souls chalked up for sec-
ond corporeality in the Aeneid.20

Brodsky criticizes the use Virgil made—or, really, did not make—of this “second corpo-
reality.” Brodsky is referring to the famous passage in Book Six of the Aeneid, where Ae-
neas witnesses the souls who are about to return to earth as the progeny of Anchises
and Aeneas, and as a host of celebrated Romans. He cannot forgive Virgil for wasting
such a stunning idea on “Augustus’ pedigree,” “blow[ing] it all for the sake of Caesar’s
lineage.”21 For Brodsky, political insecurity—he speaks with some authority on this
topic—got in the way of Virgil’s metaphysical instinct. And so it is that, at the expense
of Virgil (and of Horace as well), Brodsky names Ovid as the best poet of all, since, in
Brodsky’s view, it was Ovid who had vision (or imagination) surpassing that of Ho-
race, or that of Virgil, who “was more curious about Caesar’s sentimental property . . .
than about his territorial conquests.” Ovid’s poetry tells the truth about both matter
and spirit.

To put it bluntly, Naso insists that in this world, one thing is another. [. . .] His
game was morphology, and his take was metamorphosis. When the same sub-
stance attains a different form. The main thing is the sameness of substance.
And, unlike the rest of you, he managed to grasp the simple truth of us all being
composed of the stuff the world is made of. Since we are of this world. So we all
contain water, quartz, hydrogen, fiber, et cetera, albeit in different proportions.
Which can be reshuffled. Which already have been reshuffled into that girl.
Small wonder she becomes a tree. Just a shift in her cellular makeup. Anyhow,
with our species, shifting from the animate to the inanimate is the trend.22

This represents profound insight into the ultimate interests of the Metamorphoses. Italo
Calvino came to the same conclusion, interestingly, naming as the principal theme of
Ovid’s long poem “the contiguity of all the figures and forms of existing things, anthro-
pomorphic and otherwise”: “Fauna and flora, mineral kingdom, and firmament embrace
within their common substance what we are accustomed to think of as human, in the
sense of an aggregate of bodily, psychological, and moral qualities.”23 In Brodsky’s ver-

20. Ibid.
21. LH 443.
22. LH 452, 454. Cf. T. Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press,
2005), 207.
23. Italo Calvino, “Ovid and Universal Contiguity,” in his collection of essays, The Literature Machine
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1987; repr. London: Vintage, 1997), 147. Cf. Ziolkowski, 171.
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sion of “the contiguity between all the figures and forms of existing things,” the inani-
mate appears to get the last word, or the first word. Brodsky insists in the Hardy essay
(which is entitled, “Wooing the Inanimate,” by the way), “that language flows into the
human domain from the realm of nonhuman truths and dependencies, that it is ulti-
mately the voice of inanimate matter, and that poetry just registers now and then its
ripple effects.”24
Language emanates from the inanimate, as Brodsky would have it, and that lan-
guage speaks through poets, who Brodsky insists are not different from anyone else, ex-
cept for the fact that in them the processes of language are greatly accelerated. Poets con-
tribute to an evolutionary growth of the inanimate into language—an idea that Brodsky’s
friend, Derek Walcott, captures in the line, “too slow the stones crawling toward language
every night.”25 What is the point of this evolutionary process? Brodsky offered an expla-
nation in “An Immodest Proposal”:

The purpose of evolution, believe it or not, is beauty, which survives it all and
generates truth simply by being a fusion of the mental and the sensual. As it is
always in the eye of the beholder, it can’t be wholly embodied save in words:
that’s what ushers in a poem, which is as incurably semantic as it is incurably
euphonic.26

Near the end of “Letter to Horace,” Brodsky tells Horace that Ovid nearly put all fu-
ture poets out of business in his tale of Narcissus and Echo, where sound and sight, “the
mental and the sensual,” semantics and euphony, are nearly fused. Brodsky thanks God
for the “hexametric inertia” that kept Ovid off, and he is also grateful that the myth in-
sists “on keeping eyesight and hearing apart.”27 As it is, no poet can hope to succeed in
fusing vision and meter—when that will finally happen, apparently, it is for language it-
self to decide. And yet, since poets serve language, Brodsky seems to insist that poets will
continue trying to do just that.
If the foregoing gives some idea of the value Joseph Brodsky placed on the Roman
poets and how he read them, yet it might occur to someone to ask, “Where are the
Greeks?” Indeed, Russian poets of Mandelstam’s era considered the Greeks a vital source
of inspiration, a fact indicated plainly by the titles of the Acmeists’ journals, Apollon and
The Hyperborean.28 That is why Brodsky is not merely joking about Horace’s mentioning
his people and his country, when Horace wrote “Gelonos” and “Caspium.” There is a mu-
tual benefit, furthermore, in Horace’s having recognized the Hyperboreans and Scythi-
ans in his poetry. It means that one of the “fathers” of a great European tradition took no-
tice of a Russian milieu, admittedly in a proto-stage—a highly significant fact, given that
Russian poets for a century or two have shown a great interest in positioning themselves
vis-à-vis a European tradition. (True even of a recent poet, Aleksandr Kushner, as seen in
such poems as “It’s harder, longer saying our goodbyes,” or “Apollo in the Snow.”29) If

24. “Wooing the Inanimate,” 333.

25. Derek Walcott, Midsummer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), Poem IX.
26. “An Immodest Proposal,” 207.
27. LH 455–56.
28. Robert Tracy, “Mandelstam: The Poet as Builder,” in Osip Mandelstam, Stone, translated and
introduced by R. T. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 19.
29. See in note 11.
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90 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Summer 2005

Brodsky acts as if to take himself seriously as a Hyperborean, it would mean that he mat-
tered enough to have been predicted by Horace. This early awareness of a “tadpole”
Russian culture benefits Horace in turn, by making him appear as mantic, and gifted
with the kind of imagination Brodsky promotes as a chief measure of poetic greatness.
Brodsky wrote of Mandelstam that he went through a Greek period before entering
into a Roman one: “[t]oward the twenties, the Roman themes gradually overtake the
Greek and biblical references, largely because of the poet’s growing identification with
the archetypal predicament of ‘a poet versus an empire.’” Brodsky himself seems to have
skipped the Greek stage altogether, and to have proceeded straight into a life-long culti-
vation of Romanitas. One explanation of this preference would surely be that Brodsky
himself experienced that Roman predicament of “a poet versus an empire.”30 Also,
though Brodsky by no means keeps to a single poetic form, there is something quintes-
sentially epigrammatic in Brodsky’s style, as the inscription to Martial of “Letters to a
Roman Friend” signifies. But it must also be reckoned that Brodsky felt himself to be a
European and, given the central role Italy played in the cultural formation of Europe, es-
pecially in the dissemination of classical culture, Italy loomed large in Brodsky’s think-
ing. The “Roman Elegies” witness to the fact. Brodsky spoke of these poems as a dialogue
of north and south,31 very much after Goethe, but also clearly a dialogue between the
north and south of Brodsky’s own aesthetic sense and of his poetic soul. It is in keeping
with this attraction to Italy that, having spent a good deal of time in Venice during the
last part of his life, Brodsky should choose to be buried there.
This is not to say that the Greeks are wholly absent from Brodsky’s poetry. There are
Greek themes in his work, as for example in “Daedalus in Sicily”32—though even with
this poem it is difficult not to hear a Roman voice, Ovid’s or Virgil’s, while one is reading.
If one were earnest about the search, one might reconsider all the mentions of Pythagoras
in “Letter to Horace.” Certainly these references, together with Brodsky’s claims about
reincarnation and “second corporeality,” need not seem merely outlandish, in view of the
theme that Brodsky highlights in Ovid, which is the same one Calvino did: “the contigu-
ity between all the figures and forms of existing things, anthropomorphic and otherwise.”
Another important figure for Brodsky is Orpheus, who is indeed not unrelated to
Pythagoras and the motif of a “second corporeality”—Orpheus is the archetype of the
poet who defeats, or at least resists death. Through the power of his poetry Orpheus is
able to animate nature, even the very stones, an emblematic moment that Brodsky would
probably read as an inversion of reality, insofar as it is the inanimate, in his view, which
animates an Orpheus. Though one doubts whether Brodsky knew that Orpheus was
credited in late antiquity with a poem called Lithica (a work, admittedly, that reveals little
of Orphic doctine), yet it is telling that Brodsky begins his poet’s autobiography in “Let-
ter to Horace” with the story of how as a young man he took part in a geological survey
of the Caspian region.
At the end of “Roman Elegies,” Brodsky pictures a sad-looking Orphean figure,
shuffling “across the frozen/Tanaïs”—there is the ancient premonition of Russia, again—
”dropping from the picture, limping,/occiputs covered with wilted laurels, and bliz-
zards’ powder—/toward Time[.]”33 Brodsky’s Orpheus performs a catabatic feat made

30. “The Child of Civilization,” 128.

31. Solomon Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 201.
32. J. Brodsky, So Forth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 72.
33. J. Brodsky, To Urania (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 69.
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even more heroic than that of his original by the extreme debility of the figure Brodsky
depicts. He is a stirring figure, though he is limping and his laurels have wilted. And yet,
this Orpheus is, after all, more Virgil’s than any Greek’s, insofar as he repeats the fading
Orpheus of the last Georgic (4.517–20).
Helleno-Roman or Romano-Russian, whichever this Orpheus might be, he acts and,
finally, speaks as a poet after Brodsky’s own heart. At the very beginning of “Roman Ele-
gies” the poet declares his fate:

Setting a naked foot on the rosy marble,

The body steps toward its future: to its attire.
If somebody shouted “Freeze!” I’d perform that marvel
As this city happily did in its childhood hour.

Throughout these elegies, the poet is inclining (or declining) toward the condition of
stone. He finds “the sight of ruins” comforting; he hides “in the bowels of the Eternal
City” and is loomed over by the Colosseum, “the skull of Argos.” The “attire” of stone
that represents death is consistently prefigured as bone, the human skeleton serving si-
multaneously as the frame of the individual and his or her impending wreck. The poet
does not despair, however, but becomes elated, strangely. In the Beloved he seems to in-
timate the Muse—“Lesbia, Julia, Cynthia, Livia, Michelina”—in relation to whom he can
sense an immortality.34 The poet fails utterly to escape the horizontal, just like any mon-
ument, yet once again it is the intimation of a beauty that the inanimate achieves through
language—and so through a poet—that provides a profound comfort.

Better lean on a portico, loose the white shirt that billows,

stone cools the spinal column, gray pigeons mutter,
and watch how the sun is sinking into gardens and distant villas,
how the water—the tutor
of eloquence—pours from the rusted lips, repeating
not a thing, save a nymph with her marble truants,
save that it’s cold and fresh, save that it’s splitting
the face into rippling ruins.

The comfort is not total, it is true, or unambivalent. The coolness of stone that brings re-
lief will turn to a chill; and the column of the spine suggests solidity, but also a future
ruin. Likewise, as the poet leans against a portico, his shirt billows, which disrupts that
momentary geometry; just so, the sinking sun brings the horizon-line down to a zero.
The omen of “gray pigeons mutter” is also grim: faded color and the audible reduced to
something unintelligible. Yet water is fluent, like time. It instructs the poet to accept

34. For a discussion of this elegy in relation to a Catullan antecedent and to the themes of poetic
creation, life and death, and immortality, see Michael von Albrecht, “Catull: Ein Dichter mit
europäischer Ausstrahlung,” in von Albrecht’s Literatur als Brücke: Studien zur Rezeptions-
geschichte und Komparatistik, Spudasmata 90 (Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Georg Olms Ver-
lag, 2003), 36–39. (I would like to thank Professor Wolfgang Haase for kindly bringing this
work of von Albrecht’s to my attention.)
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92 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Summer 2005

change everywhere, in all things, and that includes, ultimately, in himself. Water and
time teach that change is incessant—”repeating not a thing”—but it is not entirely so:

repeating
not a thing, save a nymph with her marble truants,
save that it's cold and fresh, save that it's splitting
the face into rippling ruins.

The force of the inanimate, which registers for us as change, is “cold and fresh,” yet it
does not obliterate the poet, does not erase the human oval, but rearranges instead, or
even renders the face as “an uncommon visage.” It is the poet’s task—aesthetic, also eth-
ical—to accept this change as a freedom, and to accept along with it the quotient of beauty,
small or not, that he is able to perceive amid the change. In Rome, the poet learns this les-
son well. In “Homage to Marcus Aurelius,” Brodsky discusses his feeling of being a copy
in “the Eternal City,” an inferior one at that, and though this platonic notion offers a sense
of the beautiful, it also puts beauty nearly out of reach (IX). The poets of Rome faced this
state of affairs, narrated it, if without explaining it (except for Lucretius), and its sages
taught—or tried to—how one might cope with the fact of the embrace of materiality
being at once so overly firm and yet, from one’s mortal viewpoint, impermanent. Hence
derives Brodsky’s admiration of Marcus Aurelius, of his “acceptance of the perceptible
reality” and his “serenity” (XVIII), the “postscript to passions” and “lack of illusion,”
(VIII) inscribed in the sculpted visage of his Campidolgio bronze. Hence, too, Brodsky’s
portrait of Orpheus—shuffling, limping, disappearing, “covered with wilted laurels and
blizzards’ powder— / toward Time.”
The voice that speaks in the next stanza of “Roman Elegies”—its final stanza—might
well belong to Brodsky’s shuffling, fading Orpheus:

Lean over. I’ll whisper something to you: I am

grateful for everything: for the chicken cartilage
and for the chirr of scissors already cutting
out the void for me—for it is your hem.
Doesn’t matter if it’s pitch-black, doesn’t matter if
it holds nothing: no ovals, no limbs to count.
The more invisible something is,
the more certain it’s been around,
and the more obviously it’s everywhere. You
were the first to whom all this happened, were you?
For a nail holding something one would divide by two—
were it not for remainders—there is no gentler quarry.
I was in Rome. I was flooded by light. The way
a splinter can only dream about.
Golden coins on the retina are to stay—
enough to last one through the whole blackout.

Brodsky told Solomon Volkov that in writing this last line he had in mind Gennady
Smakov, a friend of Brodsky’s who had died of AIDS.35 The Orphean voice in this stanza,

35. Volkov, Conversations, 200. David Cronenberg, once asked whether his film, The Fly (1986),
served as a metaphor of the AIDS epidemic, has said recently in a radio interview that he
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Brodsky’s or Smakov’s, does not bewail his fate, or betray fear of the blackness of death.
The voice of the poet registers gratitude to its muse, whose hem is the void; at least the
muse does that for its poet, i.e., give nothingness some shape, and in that regard a glint of
meaning. Though the poet is headed toward the invisible, moreover, it is apparently not
toward nothingness, since the “invisible” possesses duration on the one hand and ubiq-
uity on the other. Once entered there, the poet is safeguarded by another kind of vision,
one whose impressions on the retina remain alive, as in a dream. And the poet’s ultimate
word bespeaks the power to endure—“enough to last one through the whole black-
out”—just like the Orphean head which, once struck to stone, never ceases its singing.

responded that it served rather as a metaphor of the process of aging, inevitable and universal
(NPR’s Fresh Air, October 3, 2005). So it would seem that Brodsky here does the reverse, by in-
scribing within an elegiac sequence which meditates on aging and mortality the particular loss
of a beloved friend to AIDS.