Joseph Brodsky's Roman Body

• Autores: Timoty P. Hofmeister
• Localización: International journal of the classical tradition, ISSN 1073-0508, Vol. 12, Nº 1, 2005, págs. 81-93
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In ¿Letter to Horace,¿ an essay published in the year before he died, Joseph Brodsky, or his narrator, describes an erotic dream-encounter with a strange body that resembles a lover¿s he once knew in Rome. This body represents Roman poetry, whose appeal lies in its formal excellence and historical importance, but especially Horace¿s, which attracts Brodsky because of its metrical variety. Horace stands out for his power to surprise a reader through the manipulation, or recreation, of language. Brodsky¿s account of Horace¿s poetry (as well as of Virgil¿s and Ovid¿s) advances a set of ideas that appear in his other writing: that language issues from the inanimate; that a poet does not select from language so much as language chooses a poet, ¿and thereby accomplishes world-historical (evolutionary) goals of its own;¿ that the fruit of this evolution is beauty; and that lyric poetry is ¿a metaphysical affair whose goal is either accomplishing or liberating one¿s soul: winnowing it from the chaff of existence.¿