Volume 33, Number 10 · June 12, 1986
Mastering Speech
By John Bayley
Less Than One: Selected Essays
by Joseph Brodsky
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 501 pp., $25.00
It would be tempting to say that Brodsky and Auden are the only really civilized great poets of their respective generations, and of the past few decades. Tempting, and in spite of the difficulty of saying what one means exactly, far from untrue. Civilization, in their sense of it, is an affair of basic humor, a humor which naturally pervades their being and their works, like salt in sea water. With most poets, and writers generally, there is a point at which humor stops, if it has ever started. Many poets, like other writers, can be skittish, or funny, or deeply and wisely comical; and they cultivate these qualities—as Robert Frost did, say, or as Robert Lowell did—in league with their personalities and poetic will. But humor only really exists as the spirit of civilization if it is everywhere inside it, and inside the poetry that can be its expression.
Review, 3358 words
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