ONCE described by Seamus Heaney as "half heroic prince, half hungry fighter", the Russian poet and 1987 Nobel Laureate, Joseph Brodsky, died on Sunday in New York, at the age of 55. Abrupt perhaps, but it is not a surprise. Death had long been pursuing him.
By the time he had reached 52, his sense of mortality had already been well sharpened by three major heart operations. In contrast to his robust appearance and somewhat cantankerous, combative personality, by the time I met him in 1992, his movements had assumed the heavy weariness of an older, frailer man.
Brodsky, having spent 20 years in the United States, spoke American English with a heavy Russian accent, a habitual shrug and a fierce humour which was at times as terrifying as it was funny. His characteristic impatience often infiltrated his jaggedly risky, terse, incantatory poetry - with its themes of time, the loss of youth and love - even when at its most lyrical. The power of his dramatic, personal, buoyant verse is expressed in its sharp, compressed observations. His genius as a writer lies in his essays.
"Everything can change in Petersburg," he writes, "except its weather. And its light. It's the Northern light, pale and diffused, one in which both memory and eye operate with unusual sharpness. In this light, and thanks to the directness and length of the streets, a walker's thoughts travel farther than his destination".
A love of Russia dominates his writing. He always saw himself as an involuntary exile: "I had lost my country, just like that." Yet his memories are never sentimental and rarely even particularly nostalgic. By the age of 24 he had only had a handful of poems published. Four were anthologised in Leningrad in the mid 1960s, and he had angered the authorities so much that he had been arrested twice, accused of "social parasitism" - an official euphemism for being a poet and was sentenced to five years "corrective" labour in northern Russia. As well as being a poet, Brodsky was Jewish.
In June 1972, just under two years into his sentence, he was "given a one way ticket out" and allowed to leave Russia. Staying briefly in Vienna, he moved on to London, before arriving in the United States where an American publisher had already published a Russian language edition of his poems. He appeared to have found a second home.
Granted US citizenship in 1977, he was quickly established as an academic and critic. While teaching at Colombia, he delivered his famous lecture on Auden's September 1, 1939 as part of a lecture on modern lyric poetry. Yale presented him with an honorary doctorate in 1978 and his Selected Poems were published by Penguin. In the following year, he was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Becoming one of the youngest ever laureates at 47, Brodsky's "all embracing authorship imbued with a clarity of thought and poetic intensity" was praised by the Nobel committee. It seems a strange comment to make of a poet, but his finest work is contained in the collection of prose writings, Less Than One (1986), which presents his range as a memoirist, historical commentator and critic.
Much of the writing in these essays possesses the lyricism of verse, while his literary criticism has a provocative exactness. He was a natural teacher, a gifted translator and a perceptive, relentless critic. Proud of describing himself as self educated - "I was never a student" - Brodsky city school at 15 and began working in a factory. Literature at school was something to be learnt off by heart his real reading began later as he read the books left behind by foreign exchange students and listened to the BBC World Service.
Assessing Dostoyevsky's style, he wrote "his sentences have a feverish, mysterious, idiosyncratic pace". While many poets despair of the vagaries of translation, he was far more encouraging, suggesting "it all depends on the translator; their facility, their versatility". It was through his own translation work that he first became known outside Russia.
Opinions vary as to the quality of his translations of his own work - and most of the English translations of his verse are by him - but his versions of the English metaphysical poets and also of the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz are well regarded. In 1972, he translated Behan's The Quare Fellow.
In a country in which public poetry readings have always attracted mass rally attendances filling a sports stadium with ease the Russian poet has enjoyed a sacred aura. Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Maria Tsvetasva, Boris Pasternak - theirs is a series of individual stories shaped by courage, honesty, lyric genius, personal tragedies and, above all, by passion. It was a tradition that he grew up in.
EARLY in his poetic life he became conscious of the heroic as a vital element in Russian poetry.
Brodsky, who himself was recognised by Akhmatova as the most gifted lyric voice of his generation wrote movingly of Nadezhada Mandelstam, the poet's widow and her determined efforts to save his poetry as she "dodged across one sixth of the Earth's surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorising them by night in the event they were found by Furies with a search warrant".
With his abrupt, confident almost exasperated demeanour, Brodsky professed to having no time for the poet as showman. It is also true that when he won the Nobel Prize many applauded the choice because of his position as a Russian poet in exile prepared to speak openly, rather than because of his status as a poet. It was the common political reality experience by many dissident writers - this century. The publication of To Urania: Selected Poems 1965-1985, helped broaden his readership, while a second prose work, Watermark (1992), a personalised physical and metaphysical study of Venice - commissioned by the city - though disappointing, offered further insights into a very private public man.
Many poets recite their work far better than Brodsky did. With one hand forced deep in a pocket, he seemed to rock back on his heels. It was a physical act; closing his eyes, he opened his voice which had a harshly urgent, quite monotonous quality when reciting in English. But the register dropped when he switched over to Russian and his breath defying blank verse acquired the chanting incantation of church ritual.
A life long believer in the artist as belligerent, he considered art as a political statement, yet always maintained that his own work was apolitical. For all his anger, despair and disgust with his country's history, Brodsky announced to me with his challenging certainty: "There is only one enemy, and it's not the State it's the vulgarity of the human heart". His premature passing marks the loss of a bluntly honest intelligence whose genius as an intuitive interpreter of literature surpasses even the vigour of his own poetry.
