JB

“Joseph Brodsky was, in the line of Baudelaire, a flaneur. His presence in a place always struck me as a magnificent gift, and I used to think of him turning up incognito and unannounced in a city somewhere--be it London or Istanbul or Lisbon or Venice--an autodidact and globe-trotter, as though these weren't distinct things, but basically aspects of one: the poet. A 'spend-thrift talker,' in Robert Lowell's phrase, he was bewilderingly well read and au fait, generous, unsnobbish, stern, funny, modest and doctrinaire.”

{ Michael Hofmann, Behind the Lines: Pieces on Writing and Pictures, Faber & Faber, 2001 }