“What song, what home, what calm or one clarity can I not quite come to, never quite see: this field, this sky,… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“How much of twentieth-century poetry, how much of my own poetry, is the cry of the damned?” — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany. — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“Let us remember...that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
I can't think offhand of any American poets who have Mandelstam's urgency, but it's a different country and a different time, and… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
Mandelstam's style is not singular. He could be stately and traditional, ribald and funny, hectic, elegiac. He could handle abstractions and ideas… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
I'm drawn to this range, that's for sure, but I suppose the thing that most appeals to me about Mandelstam is the… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“You cannot devote your life to an abstraction. Indeed, life shatters all abstractions in one way or another, including words such as… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“And I Said To My Soul, Be Loud Madden me back to an afternoon I carry in me not like a wound… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
I find myself continually falling back into wounds, wishes, terrors I thought I had risen beyond. — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“Intellectuals and artists concerned with faith tend to underestimate the radical, inviolable innocence it requires. We read and read, write long, elaborate essays and… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
We should be suspicious when God's call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations. — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“Let us remember...that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
To be truly alive is to feel one's ultimate existence within one's daily existence. — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God,… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“How many loves fail because, in an unconscious effort to make our weaknesses more strong, we link with others precisely at those points? How… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“It is a strange thing how sometimes merely to talk honestly of God, even if it is only to articulate our feelings of separation… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“Faith cannot save you from the claims of reason, except insofar as it preserves and protects that wonderful, terrible time when reason, if only… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
