Exile, Elegy, and Auden in Brodsky's “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot”

Abstract

During the last three decades the in memoriam genre has come to occupy pride of place in the work of the exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. Through his belatedness (which is not necessarily Bloomian), his permanent exile status at the edges of two empires, and his profound poetic speculations on death as the ultimate border crossing, Brodsky now embodies the elegiac tradition in his homeland as no one has since his high‐modernist precursors, Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. And yet—and herein lies his distinct contribution to Russian verse of this century—Brodsky has constantly sought out other, nonnative precursors to mediate the dead letter of his primary Soviet culture. In “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot” he adopts the “mourning tongue” of Auden's “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” while speaking of the death of Eliot in his own distinctive Russian elegy. In this way, not only does he keep “the death of the poet… from his poems,” he keeps death from the door of his own ailing tradition.