Joseph Brodsky

Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky, who used the English form Joseph, was a Russian and American poet and essayist who lived from 1940 to 1996. He was born in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, and came into conflict with the Soviet authorities, who pressed him to emigrate in 1972. With the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters he settled in the United States, where he taught at Mount Holyoke College and at universities including Yale, Columbia, Cambridge and Michigan. The Swedish Academy awarded him the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature for an all-embracing authorship imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity, and in 1991 he was appointed United States Poet Laureate. Critics have discussed his work as that of a Christian poet, and one Russian scholar calls him a canonized classic.