Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Brodsky

Brodsky is quietly picking a fight with the idea that poetry is supposed to deliver a clean thesis. In his hands, “credo or doctrine” isn’t an end product you distill from art like a moral from a fable; it’s the raw material you risk contaminating by turning it into certainty. The line works because it flips the expected hierarchy. Doctrine usually claims the last word. Brodsky demotes it to page one.

The subtext is both aesthetic and political. Coming out of the Soviet experience (exile, censorship, the pressure to make art “useful”), Brodsky distrusts any system that demands a poet arrive at the correct conclusion. Ideology, even when it wears the respectable suit of “credo,” is a closure mechanism. Poetry, by contrast, is built for open ends: ambiguity, contradiction, the kind of thinking that doesn’t know its destination yet. Calling the poem a “metaphysical journey” isn’t mystical decoration; it’s a statement about method. Metaphysics here means what happens when language pushes past the approved meanings and keeps going.

Intent-wise, Brodsky is also defending the poet’s autonomy. If doctrine is only a departure point, then the poet is not a spokesperson but an explorer, obligated to follow the implications of an idea even when they get inconvenient. It’s an ethic of restlessness: belief is allowed, even necessary, but the poem’s job is to interrogate it, complicate it, maybe even leave it behind. That’s how poetry stays truthful without becoming propaganda.