On Grief and Reason: Essays

On Grief and Reason collects the essays that Joseph Brodsky wrote between his reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and his death in January 1996. The volume includes Brodsky's Nobel lecture; essays on the condition of exile, the nature of history, the art of reading, and the notion of the poet as an inveterate Don Giovanni; his “Immodest Proposal” for the future of poetry, written when he was serving as Poet Laureate of the United States; a consideration of the poetry of Rober...