orig. Iosip Aleksandrovich Brodsky
born May 24, 1940, Leningrad, Russia, U.S.S.R.
died Jan. 28, 1996, New York, N.Y., U.S.
Russian-born U.S. poet.
In the Soviet Union his independent spirit and irregular work record led to a five-year sentence to hard labour. Exiled in 1972, he settled in New York. He was poet laureate of the U.S. from 1991 to 1992. His lyric and elegiac poems ponder the universal concerns of life, death, and the meaning of existence. Brodsky's poetry collections include A Part of Speech (1980), History of the Twentieth Century (1986), and To Urania (1988). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987.