SOURCE: "When Society Chooses to Ignore Poetry," in Los Angeles Times, February 19, 1996, p. E3.

In the following positive review of On Grief and Reason, Harris discusses Brodsky's views on poetry.

An enigma strikes anyone who has read Russian literature and pondered Russia's history: How could the same country give birth to so many people of outstanding humanity—and, at the same time, as if to a wholly different species, so many murderous goons?

In these 21 essays [in On Grief and Reason], Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Prize-winning poet who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and lived in the United States until his death on Jan. 28, not only proves himself, unsurprisingly, to be one of the good guys but comes up, quite unexpectedly, with an answer.

Poetry.

Haven't the Russians always taken poetry more seriously than anyone else? Yes and no, Brodsky says. The "celebrated Russian intelligentsia" of...