Mandelstam Poetry Quotes & Sayings

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 I don't think it would make much sense to say that this is something that's "missing" from contemporary American poetry. — Christian Wiman

Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva - though their work is more "urgent" than most American poetry, seem to me to operate at a lesser charge than Mandelstam. — Christian Wiman

The people need poetry that will be their own secret
To keep them awake forever,
And bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing. — Osip Mandelstam

I hope for a light grief in old age.
I was born in Rome and it has returned to me.
My autumn was a kind of she-wolf,
And August - the month of Caesars - smiled at me. — Osip Mandelstam

They Sailed Away In A Silver Cup Upon A Grassy Sea — Kathleen Baldwin

And after his death - or even before it, perhaps - he lived on in camp legend as a demented old man of seventy who had once written poetry in the outside world and was therefore nicknamed The Poet. And another old man - or was it the same one? - lived in the transit camp of Vtoraya Rechka, waiting to be shipped to Kolyma, and was thought by many people to be Osip Mandelstam - which, for all I know, he may have been. That is all I have been able to find out about the last days, illness and death of Mandelstam. Others know very much less about the death of their dear ones. — Nadezhda Mandelstam

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-fly-apart-disintegrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too? — Ray Bradbury

I was born in the night of the second and third
Of January, ninety-something-or-other,
An unreliable year, and the centuries
Surround me with fire. — Osip Mandelstam

Everything is moved by love. — Osip Mandelstam

Mitt Romney has a new fundraising gimmick. If you donate $3 or more to his campaign, your name will be entered into a drawing to win a dinner with Mitt Romney and Donald Trump. If you donate more than $10, you get to sit at a different table. — Jay Leno

I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here-a sign of unparalleled respect-because they are still capable of living by it. — Osip Mandelstam

I went in and, and, and I don't know if it was her room, don't know if it was his room, I don't, I just knew I wanted to go in there and, and hurt someone. — Tommy Lynn Sells

You put a guy on a desert island, he'll do it to mud, a chicken, a barrel, anything, a knothole. — Lenny Bruce

They're never going to change. You gotta get that into your head. What they did up there? They'll keep doing that forever. You know why? Because they're withholders. That's what power is all about. Not giving people what they want. So you know what that means? It means you've got to stop wanting. Stop wanting them to love you, or be proud of you, or whatever it is you're after. 'Cause you're not gonna get it. — Kirsty Eagar

Happy the man who knows his duties! — Christian Furchtegott Gellert

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface. — Osip Mandelstam

Only in Russia poetry is respected
it gets people killed. — Osip Mandelstam

I wonder if they were aware of the power of complimentary alcohol during World War I. — Pawan Mishra