Brodsky, Joseph: On Grief and Reason: Selected Essays

On Grief and Reason: Selected Essays by Joseph Brodsky (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, paperback) Publication Date: May 12, 2020 Publisher Marketing: "On Grief and Reason collects the essays that Joseph Brodsky wrote between his reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and his death in January 1996. The volume includes Brodsky's Nobel lecture; essays on the condition of exile, the nature of history, the art of reading, and the notion of the poet as an inveterate Don Giovanni; his "Immodest Proposal" for the future of poetry, written when he was serving as Poet Laureate of the United States; a consideration of the poetry of Robert Frost; his searching estimations of Hardy, Horace, and Rilke; an affecting memoir of Stephen Spender; and a moving meditation on the figure of Marcus Aureilus. The essays, composed in Brodsky's distinctive, idiomatic English, are inventive and alive. The Nobel laureate, himself branded a 'pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers' by Soviet authorities and expel