One must learn to be in unknowingness without being proud of it.

Behind every urge to interpret is unease, anxiety.

To be truly alive is to feel one’s ultimate existence within one’s daily existence. All those trivial, frittering anxieties acquire, even if only briefly, a lightness, a rightness, a meaning. So long as anxiety is merely something to be alleviated, it is not life, or we are not alive enough to experience it as such.

When life is thriving in us, we crave to get beyond it: experience that takes us out of ourselves, poetry that articulates a shape and space for the inexpressible, prayer that obliterates self-consciousness for the sake of God.

If to be an artist is to be someone upon whom nothing is lost, as Henry James said, then it follows that to be an artist is to be in some permanent sense professionally detached.

To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality.

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.

Mandelstam’s style is not singular. He could be stately and traditional, ribald and funny, hectic, elegiac. He could handle abstractions and ideas as well as Pope or Browning but then be so musical that other poems approach pure sound.

Faith is not some hard, unchanging thing you cling to through the vicissitudes of life. Those who try to make it into this are destined to become brittle, shatterable creatures. Faith never grows harder, never so deviates from its nature and becomes actually destructive, than in the person who refuses to admit that faith is change.

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.