Top 37 Mandelstam's Quotes
#1. 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.
Christian Wiman
#2. 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
#4. The wolfhound century leaps at my shoulders,
But I am no wolf by blood.
Osip Mandelstam
#5. Perhaps the whisper was born before lips,
And the leaves in treelessness circled and flew,
And those, to whom we impart our experience as bliss,
Acquire their forms before we do
Osip Mandelstam
#6. The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.
Osip Mandelstam
#8. And Mandelstam says a poet - you go down to the shore and you see an unlikely looking from a bottle from the past, you open it. Mandelstam says, "It's okay to do so. I'm not reading someone else's mail. It was addressed to whoever found it. I found it, therefore it's addressed to me."
Edward Hirsch
#9. I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.
Osip Mandelstam
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Mandelstam was an artistic genius, the sort that any century produces only a handful of.
Christian Wiman
#14. I'm drawn to this range, that's for sure, but I suppose the thing that most appeals to me about Mandelstam is the sense you get from every poem that everything - the poet's very soul - is at stake.
Christian Wiman
#15. A raznochinets needs no memory - it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.
Osip Mandelstam
#16. Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors.
Osip Mandelstam
#18. Only in Russia poetry is respected
it gets people killed.
Osip Mandelstam
#20. I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.
Helen Dunmore
#21. For us, all that's left is kisses
tattered as the little bees
that die when they leave the hive.
Osip Mandelstam
#22. Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin out of boredom, out of helplessness, and, as it were, in a dream. (The Egyptian Stamp)
Osip Mandelstam
#23. I want you now so awfully, No longer jealous-green, I bring myself as offering Up to the guillotine.
Osip Mandelstam
#25. Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected. To think logically means to be continually amazed.
Osip Mandelstam
#26. 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
#27. I am wearied to death with life.
There's nothing it has that I want,
but I celebrate my naked earth,
there's no other world to descant.
Osip Mandelstam
#28. 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
#29. And I walk out of space
Into an overgrown garden of values,
And tear up seeming stability
And self-comprehension of causes.
And your, infinity, textbook
I read by myself, without people -
Leafless, savage medical book,
A problem book of gigantic radicals.
Osip Mandelstam
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. The horrors have made the legend of Mandelstam and are inevitably the lens through which we read his work and life. But if there had been no Stalin and no purge, Mandelstam still would have been a poet of severe emotional and existential extremity.
Christian Wiman
#33. My turn shall also come: I sense the spreading of a wing.
Osip Mandelstam
#34. I decided it is better to scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.
Nadezhda Mandelstam
#36. Mandelstam - his gift and the untamable nature of it - was like a thorn in Stalin's brain.
Christian Wiman
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