[Osip] Mandelstam, who wasn't a political thinker, loved the idea of the city-state. One of the emblems in his poetry of the politics he imagined, over and against the universalizing politics of [Carl] Marx, was the medieval city of Novgorod, which had in its center a public well where the water was free to everyone. That became for him a figure of justice.
Robert HassSometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.
Robert HassThe record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.
Robert Hass