A Part of Speech
Brodsky was tried for "social parasitism" in Leningrad at 24. His trial transcript, in which he argued that God had appointed him a poet, became a samizdat document circulating through the USSR. Expelled to the West, he wrote in Russian while living in English, and the friction between two languages became his subject. The title poem is a meditation on winter, exile, and language itself. Nobel Prize 1987.
Unless you read Russian, you get Brodsky through translations he revised himself, bending English to Russian meter until the lines clank. The wit survives; the music mostly does not. Long classical set pieces demand you care about Roman exile as much as he did. You take the greatness partly on faith.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
