Great Regulars: Indeed, [Joseph] Brodsky in English remains,

all too often, wrenched, unidiomatic, and unmusical. The genius of the Russian poet can be intuited--you can sense it in Brodsky's intellectual range, bold metaphors, and rhetorical flow--but not really experienced. Loseff quotes the American poet Robert Hass to the effect that reading Brodsky in English is "like wandering through the ruins of a noble building."

from Adam Kirsch: Tablet: Nowhere Man

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If you are primarily interested in writing, then you do not need a definite or immediate sense of your audience: you write for an ideal reader, for yourself, for God, or for a combination of the three. If you want criticism to be a lever to move the world, on the other hand, you need to know exactly where you're standing--that is, how many people are reading, and whether they're the right people. In short, you must worry about reaching a "general audience," with all the associated worries about fragmentation, the decline of print, and the rise of the Internet and its mental groupuscules.

from Adam Kirsch: The New York Times: Why Criticism Matters: The Will Not to Power, but to Self-Understanding

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