One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise. Itโs easy to become so mired in our likes or dislikes that we can no longer recall that person who once responded to poemsโand to peopleโwithout any preconceived notions of what we wanted them to be.
Christian WimanHuman imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us.
Christian WimanThe 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 WimanThere is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.
Christian Wiman