Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
Joseph BrodskyBy failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan. In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential. For what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom is precisely the gift of speech. Poetry is not a form of entertainment and in a certain sense not even a form of art, but it is our anthropological, genetic goal. Our evolutionary, linguistic beacon.
Joseph BrodskyLifeโthe way it really isโis a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse
Joseph BrodskyIt's partly the fault of the institutions of education. But it's partly the decision to be relieved of responsibility. Literature is simply the most focused form of the demands on the evolution of the species. It imposes a certain responsibility, moral, ethical and esthetic responsibility, and the species simply doesn't want to oblige.
Joseph BrodskyA poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny.
Joseph BrodskyLanguage and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite.
Joseph Brodsky