One of the ways in which I feel close to God is writing poetry.

Mandelstam - his gift and the untamable nature of it - was like a thorn in Stalin's brain.

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.

What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.

Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us.

Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.

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.