Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky

Fellowship of Poets

Irena Grudzinska Gross

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9780300155785
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This intimate portrayal of the friendship between two icons of twentieth-century poetry, Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky, highlights the parallel lives of the poets as exiles living in America and Nobel Prize laureates in literature. To create this truly original work, Irena Grudzinska Gross draws from poems, essays, letters, interviews, speeches, lectures, and her own personal memories as a confidant of both Milosz and Brodsky.

The dual portrait of these poets and the elucidation of their attitudes toward religion, history, memory, and language throw a new light on the upheavals of the twentieth-century. Gross also incorporates notes on both poets’ relationships to other key literary figures, such as W. H. Auden, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand, Robert Haas, and Derek Walcott.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• Prologue: “A Consolatory Letter”
• PART ONE. Republic of Poets
• ONE. Pan Czeslaw and Iosif
• TWO. Poetry, Youth, and Friendship
• THREE. Friendship and the Estate of Poetry
• FOUR. Women, Women Writers, and Muses
• PART TWO. Fatherlands / Otherlands
• FIVE. In the Shadow of Empire: Russia
• SIX. Iosif Brodskij and Poland
• SEVEN. Loneliness as Always: America
• EIGHT. Poetry with a Foreign Accent
• Epilogue
• NINE. Death and Friendship
• TEN. Return and Death
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index