June 21, 1988
Dear Joseph Brodsky,
It has now been six months since you delivered your Nobel Lecture on poetry and politics, and six months since I first read it in the pages of The New Republic. My first reaction was one of mild disappointment, a sense of having been let down by someone I thought I understood. As I look back over your lecture, I wonder whether you could have anticipated the reactions you triggered by making the case for poetry, and more generally for art, that you did. I wonder how well considered were your remarks that, “had we been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth,” and then this: