ABSTRACT
Joseph Brodsky, whose poetry defined itself against Russia’s political background, provides Seamus Heaney with the ‘exterior or alien material’ through which he ‘refract[s]’ his engagement with the Northern Irish experience; this ‘procedure’ of indirect confrontation of history, as Neil Corcoran demonstrates, is an essential feature of Heaney’s poetry. Defining ‘politics’, ‘aesthetics’, ‘ethics’, and ‘poetics’ with absolute clarity in Heaney and Brodsky is a salutary but impossible task, as the poets’ ideas become enriched over time by their historical and creative experiences. Brodsky died of heart failure in New York on 28 January 1996, when he was fifty-five years old. W. B. Yeats died at the same time of year, on 28 January 1939. ‘Audenesque’ is an elegy that pays tribute to Brodsky by honouring the poetics the Russian learned from W. H. Auden. Between March 1964 and November 1965 Brodsky was sent into ‘internal exile’ to the village of Norinskaia in the Archangel region of Northern Russia.
