Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

Plays
1989: Marbles : a Play in Three Acts translated by Alan Myers with Joseph Brodsky. Brodsky dedicated much love poetry to Marina Basmanova:


Denunciation
In 1963 Brodsky's poetry was denounced by a Leningrad newspaper as "pornographic and anti-Soviet. ed.

He was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1991. He taught thereafter at universities including those at Yale Cambridge and Michigan.