heard of again. These American readers may have
come to imagine the stretched seas that slowed
the return for injured veterans, many of whom
arrived stateside without respectful reception.
Brodsky’s Odysseus is apathetic and disoriented,
undone by the awareness that war has no glory
and military action serves no humane purpose.
Preserving their bits of historical fact, classi-
cal myths have evolved over the centuries, morph-
ing like clay in the hands of generations of artists,
who re-create them at a new time and place. These
ancient myths persist because they tell the univer-
sal story and because, if it is universal, that story is
always true. For Tennyson, Anouilh, and Brod-
sky, the old story provided the vehicle of each
writer’s transformation of the personal into the
political and the political into the truth of art.
Source:Melodie Monahan, Critical Essay on ‘‘Odysseus
to Telemachus,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage
Learning, 2010.
Zara M. Torlone
In the following excerpt, Torlone discusses three
poems of Joseph Brodsky that use classical motifs
and argues that classicism is used to reflect mod-
ern themes.
Russian poetry has always displayed a special
fondness for references to classical culture. Val-
entina Polukhina observes in her book on Joseph
Brodsky that this predilection for abundantly
quoting the classics is primarily due to a kind
of inferiority complex that the Russian intelli-
gentsia experienced when thinking about the
West; classical references associate Russian liter-
ature with Western culture. Russian writers main-
tained intellectual curiosity toward works created
by the authors of the West, especially by the
classical poets whose influence on Russian poetry
extended to Alexander Pushkin. However, Likha-
chev viewed this dependence on classical back-
ground as a positive, claiming that ‘‘the more
dependent a culture is, the more independent it
is.’’ This classical strain within Russian literature
provided Russian poets, particularly those of the
20th century, an opportunity to discover and
interpret antiquity in a way that created a special
allegorical language readily understandable to
those who were initiated into the complexity of
learned allusions. For Russian poets, the frequent
references to antiquity were not only a matter of
establishing cultural continuity but became the
means to present the writer’s own epoch in a
veiled but recognizable way.
Joseph Brodsky was keenly aware of this leg-
acy and was faced with the uneasy task of appro-
priating Russian classical literary heritage and
adapting it to the writing of poetry in a new
world. Brodsky himself admitted that he is
‘‘infected by the routine classcism’’ as an heir to a
long-standing literary tradition. However, there is
another aspect to Brodsky’s adherence to classical
antiquity, which is also important for our under-
standing of his interest in Greek and Roman
themes. In his ‘‘Letter to Horace’’ he writes:
For when one writes verse, one’s most immedi-
ate audience is not one’s own contemporaries,
let alone posterity, but one’s predecessors.
Those who gave one a language, those who
gave one forms. Frankly, you know that far
better than I. Who wrote those asclepiadics,
sapphics, hexameters, and alcaics, and who
were their addressees? Caesar? Maecenas?...
Fat lot they knew about or cared for trochees
and dactyls! And you were not aiming at me,
either. No, you were appealing to Asclepiades,
to Alcaeus and Sappho, to Homer himself. You
wanted to be appreciated by them, first of all.
For where is Caesar? Obviously in his place of
smiting the Scythians. And Maecenas is in his
villa.... Whereas your beloved Greeks are
right here, in your head, or should I say in
your heart, for you no doubt knew them by
heart. They were your best audience, since
you could summon them at any moment. It’s
they you were trying to impress most of all....
So if you could do this to them, why can’t I do
that to you?
This text provides manyclues for understand-
ing Brodsky’s classical poetics. The addressee of
this letter is chosen with purpose. Brodsky can be
perceived as a Horace of sorts in the realm of
Russian poetry, a poet who stood at the end of a
brilliant tradition and yet said something new both
in form and content. In addition, the letter reveals
Brodsky’s main preoccupation also expressed inTHE BITTERNESS OF ESTRANGEMENT FROM
THE HOMELAND IS CONVEYED THROUGH THE
TRANSFORMATION OF THE HEROIC INTO ITS
OPPOSITE: THERE IS NO ROAD THAT LEADS BACK
HOME, EVEN FOR ODYSSEUS.’’Odysseus to Telemachus