Brodsky was tried for "social parasitism" in Leningrad at 24. His trial transcript, in which he argued that God had appointed him a poet, became a samizdat document circulating through the USSR. Expelled to the West, he wrote in Russian while living in English, and the friction between two languages became his subject. The title poem is a meditation on winter, exile, and language itself. Nobel Prize 1987.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.