things about which I wish I knew much, much more

Those of you who know me well will probably not find it surprising that, as I find myself struggling to express complex ideas -- my reaction to the NYT article mentioned below, for example -- I turn to poetry. The poem that is rattling around my head is 'Elegy of Fortinbras', by Zbigniew Herbert, presumably written for Czeslaw Milosz.

I read this poem for the first time in an English class at Mount Holyoke taught by Joseph Brodsky. I was a true neophyte. I didn't know who Brodsky was; I didn't know enough to join the rest of the class in their obsequiousness. The class focused on Frost, Hardy and Auden. (I truly fell in love with the last of these, and have never strayed or tired of his writing. For that, I am ever grateful to Brodsky.) Towards the end of the semester, however, Brodsky lost patience with his own syllabus, throwing Akhmatova, Milosz, Herbert and others in our direction.

At the beginning of every class, we had to reproduce on paper a poem from memory. 'Elegy' is not one of them, but it has never really left me, and comes back from time to time.

I wish I knew more about Milosz, about mid-20th-century Russian and Polish poetry, about the Slavic intelligentsia, about their quarrels and disagreements. I wish I could read Milosz and Herbert in Polish. There's something in the passion of the argument, in the feeling of what is at stake, that's appealing right now.

Would anyone like to send me a tutor?