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  Speaking for Language J.M. Coetzee February 1, 1996 issue Reviewed: On Grief and Reason: Essays by Joseph Brodsky Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 412 pp., $24.00 Joseph Brodsky; drawing by David Levine In 1986 Joseph Bro dsky published  Less than One , a book of essays. Some of the essays were t...

NOTES ABOUT BRODSKY BRODSKY'S PRESENCE acted as a buttress and a point of reference for many of his fellow poets. Here was a man whose work and life always reminded us that despite what is so often said and written today, a hierarchy does exist. This hierarchy is not deducible through syllogisms, nor can it be decided upon by discussion. Rather, we confirm it anew every day by living and writing. It has something in common with the elementary division into beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood, kindness and cruelty, freedom and tyranny. Above all, hierarchy signifies respect for that which is elevated, and disdain, rather than contempt, for that which is inferior. The label "sublime" can be applied to Brodsky's poetry. In his fate as a representative of man there was that loftiness of thought which Pushkin saw in Mickiewicz: "He looked upon life from on high." In one of his essays Brodsky calls Mandelstam a poet of culture. Brodsky was himself a poet of c...