5 ideas
In 1965, while serving internal exile doing farm labor in the northern village of Norenskaya, Brodsky read Auden's 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats' and stopped at the lines saying that Time 'worships language and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives.' He took them as proof that language is older and larger than time, which is itself older than space. From this he concluded that a poet serves something that outlasts the state that is punishing him.
A poem is not the expression of a pre-formed thought. Rhyme, meter and sound push the writer toward meanings he did not intend, so language dictates the poem and uses the poet as its means of continuing to exist. A poet's real biography is therefore found in his technical choices, such as his vowels, meters and rhymes, not in the events of his life.
Platonov wrote entirely inside the bureaucratic, ideological Russian of the early Soviet period. Instead of satirizing it from outside, he followed its syntax and slogans to their literal conclusions. The resulting grotesque sentences show that the language of utopia is itself a dead end, and that the absurdity lies in the grammar, not only in the policies.
Growing up in Leningrad, Brodsky saw Lenin's face on every wall, coin and textbook. That constant repetition produced not reverence but numbness and distaste. Learning to tune out the omnipresent official image, and later walking out of school at fifteen, was the child's first act of mental independence under a system that relied on saturation.
Poetry forces extreme economy, compressing meaning into a fixed metrical space and moving by sound and association rather than exposition. A poet who turns to prose, as Tsvetaeva did, carries over that density, those leaps and that attention to every word's sonic weight. The result is prose more concentrated than a prose writer would normally produce.