Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity".

[12] So long had life together been, that once the snow began to fall, it seemed unending; that, lest the flakes should make her eyelids wince, I'd shield them with my hand, and they, pretending not to believe that cherishing of eyes, would beat against my palm like butterflies.

His friend, Ludmila Shtern (Людмила Яковлевна Штерн [ru], Ljudmíla Jákovlevna Štern), recalled working with Brodsky on an irrigation project in his "geological period" (working as a geologist's assistant): "We bounced around the Leningrad Province examining kilometers of canals, checking their embankments, which looked terrible.

[11] Brodsky dedicated much love poetry to Marina Basmanova: I was only that which you touched with your palm over which, in the deaf, raven-black night, you bent your head ...

He was charged with social parasitism[16] by the Soviet authorities in a trial in 1964, finding that his series of odd jobs and role as a poet were not a sufficient contribution to society.

[10][17] They called him "a pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers" who failed to fulfill his "constitutional duty to work honestly for the good of the motherland".

"[12][18] For his "parasitism" Brodsky was sentenced to five years hard labor and served 18 months on a farm in the village of Norenskaya, in the Archangelsk region, 350 miles from Leningrad.

He wrote on his typewriter, chopped wood, hauled manure, and at night read his anthologies of English and American poetry, including a lot of W. H. Auden and Robert Frost.

"[19] Brodsky's sentence was commuted in 1965 after protests by prominent Soviet and foreign cultural figures,[20] including Evgeny Evtushenko, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as Akhmatova.

[10][15] Brodsky became a cause célèbre in the West also, when a secret transcription of trial minutes was smuggled out of the country, making him a symbol of artistic resistance in a totalitarian society, much like his mentor, Akhmatova.

Since the stern art of poetry calls for words, I, morose, deaf, and balding ambassador of a more or less insignificant nation that's stuck in this super power, wishing to spare my old brain, put on clothes – all by myself – and head for the main street: for the evening paper.

[11] Brodsky returned to Leningrad in December 1965 and continued to write over the next seven years, many of his works being translated into German, French, and English and published abroad.

In 1972, while Brodsky was being considered for exile, the authorities consulted mental health expert Andrei Snezhnevsky, a key proponent of the notorious pseudo-medical diagnosis of "paranoid reformist delusion".

[12][26] After a short stay in Vienna, Brodsky settled in Ann Arbor, with the help of poets Auden and Proffer, and became poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan for a year.

In 1995, Gleb Uspensky, a senior editor at the Russian publishing house, Vagrius, asked Brodsky to return to Russia for a tour, but he could not agree.

He was a greatly honored professor, was on first name terms with the heads of many large publishing houses and connected to the significant figures of American literary life.

His friend Ludmila Shtern wrote that many Russian intellectuals in both Russia and America assumed his influence was unlimited, that a nod from him could secure them a book contract, a teaching post or a grant, that it was in his gift to assure a glittering career.

His position as a lauded émigré and Nobel Prize winner won him enemies and stoked resentment, the politics of which, she writes, made him feel "deathly tired" of it all toward the end.

He was buried in a non-Catholic section of the San Michele cemetery in Venice, Italy, also the resting place of Ezra Pound and Igor Stravinsky.

Auden, Thomas Hardy, Rainer Maria Rilke and Robert Frost, sketches of his own life, and those of contemporaries such as Akhmatova, Nadezhda Mandelshtam, and Stephen Spender.

During his term as Poet Laureate, Brodsky promoted the idea of bringing the Anglo-American poetic heritage to a wider American audience by distributing free poetry anthologies to the public through a government-sponsored program.

Librarian of Congress James Billington wrote: Joseph had difficulty understanding why poetry did not draw the large audiences in the United States that it did in Russia.

He was proud of becoming an American citizen in 1977 (the Soviets having made him stateless upon his expulsion in 1972) and valued the freedoms that life in the United States provided.

He thought that people who are restless or fearful or lonely or weary might pick up poetry and discover unexpectedly that others had experienced these emotions before and had used them to celebrate life rather than escape from it.

He said, "By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan.

In interview with Sven Birkerts in 1979, Brodsky reflected: In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature.

[34]Librarian of Congress Dr James Billington, wrote: He was the favored protégé of the great lady of Petersburg, Anna Akhmatova, and to hear him read her poems in Russian in the Library of Congress was an experience to make one's hair stand on end even if one did not understand the Russian language.

Many works were dedicated to other writers such as Tomas Venclova, Octavio Paz, Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, and Benedetta Craveri.

A Part of Speech (New York and Oxford, 1980), his second major collection in English, includes translations by Anthony Hecht, Howard Moss, Derek Walcott, and Richard Wilbur.

[46] Victoria Poleva wrote Summer music (2008), a chamber cantata based on the verses by Brodsky for violin solo, children choir and Strings and Ars moriendi (1983–2012), 22 monologues about death for soprano and piano (two monologues based on the verses by Brodsky ("Song" and "Empty circle").