Readers of poetry make aesthetic judgements about verse. It is quite common to hear intuitive
statements about poets' rhythms. It is said for example that Joseph Brodsky the Russian poet
and 1987 Nobel Prize laureate sounds English when he writes in Russian. Yet it is far from
clear what this statement means from a linguistic point of view. What is English about
Brodsky's Russian poetry? And in what way are his English rhythms different from the verse of
his Russian predecessors?The book provides an analysis of Brodsky's experiment bringing
evidence from an unusually wide variety of disciplines and theories rarely combined in a single
study including the generative approach to meter the Russian quantitative approach analysis
of readers' intuitions about poetic rhythm analysis of the poet's source readings as well as
acoustic phonetics statistics and archival research. The distinct analytic approaches applied
in this book to the same phenomenon complement one another each providing insight alternate
approaches do not and showing that only a combination of theories and methods allows us to
fully appreciate what Brodsky's English accent really was and what any poetic innovation
means.
