The Leningrad Poet and “a gift fit for a king”

How did you first hear about Joseph Brodsky? I had never heard of him before his Kafkaesque Leningrad trial in early 1964. When I first began to visit the Soviet Union in 1956, he was a teenager, and hadn’t even started to write poetry. By the time of my second and third visits, in 1957 and 1960, he had written several poems, but none of them found their way into the samizdat I was reading. During that time, he said he had started to write verse because he had read “a quite remarkable Soviet poet—Boris Slutsky.”¹ Both poets experimented