Volume 47, Number 16 · October 19, 2000
Working for the Dictionary
By Charles Simic
Collected Poems in English
by Joseph Brodsky, edited by Ann Kjellberg
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 540 pp., $30.00
Poets have two ways of achieving fame in autocratic societies: they can either sing the praises of the men in power, or they can irritate them. In the past, it was the monarch and the clergy they had to watch out for. If they got into hot water, banishment and the promise of eternal damnation were the usual punishment. In our time, ideologues of new utopias, from the Soviet Union to China, turned out to be far more bloodthirsty overseers of poetry. Even in the United States, poetry books with real or imagined erotic and blasphemous content are regularly removed from the shelves of school libraries to please some self-appointed thought policeman.
Review, 4131 words
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