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About Joseph Brodsky | Academy of American Poets

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Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad on May 24, 1940.

Joseph Brodsky 1940 - 1996 Read poems by this poet Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad on May 24, 1940. He left school at the age of fifteen, taking jobs in a morgue, a mill, a ship’s boiler room, and a geological expedition. During this time, Brodsky taught himself English and Polish and began writing poetry. Brodsky was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 after serving eighteen months of a five-year sentence in a labor camp in northern Russia. According to Brodsky, literature turned his life around. “I was a normal Soviet boy,” he said. “I could have become a man of the system. But somethi

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