Mandelstam - his gift and the untamable nature of it - was like a thorn in Stalin's brain. — Christian Wiman Brain Copy Share Image
It's just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities. — Christian Wiman Demand Copy Share Image
“How much of twentieth-century poetry, how much of my own poetry, is the cry of the damned?” — Christian Wiman Damnation Copy Share Image
Mandelstam was an artistic genius, the sort that any century produces only a handful of. — Christian Wiman Art Copy Share Image
One of the ways in which I feel close to God is writing poetry. — Christian Wiman Feels Copy Share Image
To be truly alive is to feel one's ultimate existence within one's daily existence. — Christian Wiman Alive Copy Share Image
Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms. — Christian Wiman Faith Copy Share Image
I find myself continually falling back into wounds, wishes, terrors I thought I had risen beyond. — Christian Wiman Fall Copy Share Image
There are dangers for an artist in any academic environment. Academia rewards people who know their own minds and have developed an… — Christian Wiman Academia Copy Share Image
I honestly don’t know whether I am describing something essential about the way we know God or merely my own weakness of… — Christian Wiman Christianity Copy Share Image
I suppose I do believe that the greatest art consoles a wound that it creates, that art can give you the capacity… — Christian Wiman Art 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 Appeals Copy Share Image
“To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and… — Christian Wiman Faith Copy Share Image
“Faith steals upon you like dew: some days you wake and it is there. And like dew, it gets burned off in… — Christian Wiman Faith Copy Share Image
I think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure… — Christian Wiman Creativity 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,… — Christian Wiman Faith Copy Share Image
“It is no blasphemy to say that every man creates the God creating him. We are facets of a work whose finished… — Christian Wiman Creating Copy Share Image
“Memory is the basis of individual personality,” Miguel de Unamuno writes, “just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of… — Christian Wiman Individual personality 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 Believe Copy Share Image
“I listen to a radio segment about scientists measuring the radioactive decay after such large-scale catastrophes as September 11 or the 2003… — Christian Wiman Decay 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 Culture 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,… — Christian Wiman Absolutes 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 Poetry Copy Share Image
I can see now how deeply God's absence affected my unconscious life, how under me always there was this long fall that… — Christian Wiman Absence 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… — Christian Wiman Christianity 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… — Christian Wiman Art Copy Share Image
“Art can model the more difficult dynamic of transfiguring one’s life, but at some point the dynamic reverses itself: life models, or… — Christian Wiman Art 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 Able Copy Share Image
“What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is… — Christian Wiman Christianity Copy Share Image
“Religious despair is often a defense against boredom and the daily grind of existence. Lacking intensity in our lives, we say that… — Christian Wiman Christianity 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… — Christian Wiman Love Copy Share Image
We should be suspicious when God's call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations. — Christian Wiman Conform Copy Share Image
“For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things and I will ride this tantrum back to God” — Christian Wiman Wasted 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 American poetry 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 Abstraction Copy Share Image
It is easy enough to write and talk about God while remaining comfortable within the contemporary intellectual climate. Even people who would… — Christian Wiman Christ Copy Share Image
