How about Frank, who brings Auden and Maiakovsky together (in the same poet if not the same poem)?

I think what Ron was trying to say was that Brodsky had no interest in Vladimir M., and when he came to the U.S., had no interest in really interesting modern poetry, preferring the Auden strain of English-language verse to the poetry influenced by the international avant-garde. I remember too that Brodsky wasn't too popular for his political stands either (support of Vietnam war?) when he came this way. Denise L in the APR took him to task both for disdaining free verse and supporting the war.

If we see New Criticism and Russian Formalism as two branches of "formalist" criticism that developed independently, Brodksy fell in with the Auden-influenced academic school influenced by New Criticism and was distant from the Formalism of his own homeland, associated with the Soviet but pre-Stalinist cultural ferment of Russian Futurism. In all of this is an implicit equation: Russian Formalism is to Russian Futurism as Anglo-American New Criticism is to the anti-modernist neo-modernism influenced by Auden and a certain reading of Eliot's essays. In other words, both RussForm and NewCrit are the critical movements parellel to and supportive of certain manifestations of literary modernism prevalent in their respective milieux. Roman J. even wrote some futurist poetry, I believe, in the same way JC Ransom and Allen Tate were both New Critics and founders of the anti modern neo-modernist school that sought to displace the radicalism of actual Modern Poetry.