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.

I honestly don’t know whether I am describing something essential about the way we know God or merely my own weakness of mind.

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.

We should be suspicious when God's call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations.

God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.

It's just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities.