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Christian Wiman Biography

Christian Wiman is an American poet and editor born in 1966 and raised in the small west Texas town of Snyder. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the Prague School of Economics. In 2003, he became editor of the oldest American magazine of verse, Poetry, a role he stepped down from in June 2013. Wiman now teaches Literature and Religion at Yale University and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

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Christian Wiman Quotes

I can see now how deeply God's absence affected my unconscious life, how under me always there was this long fall that pride and fear and self-love at once protected me from and subjected me to. . . . For if grace woke me to God's presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe.

Believe, Fall, Fear, Grace, Pain, Subjected

I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence that the world, including many prose writers, doesn't recognize as discipline. It is, though. It's the discipline to endure hours that you refuse to fill with anything but the possibility of poetry, though you may in fact not be able to write a word of it just then, and though it may be playing practical havoc with your life. It's the discipline of preparedness.

Discipline, Facts, Including, Vast, Writers, Writing

There 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.

Home, Ambition, Anxiety, True, Kind

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.

Anna, Linked, Poet, Two, Urgent

To be truly alive is to feel one's ultimate existence within one's daily existence.

Alive, Existence, Feels, Ultimate

Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.

Backyard, Backyards, Epiphany, Garden, Poets, Religion

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

Demand, Different, Perception, Perceptions

I find myself continually falling back into wounds, wishes, terrors I thought I had risen beyond.

Continually, Fall, Falling, Terror, Thought, Wish

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.

Ideas, Musical, Pure, Ribald, Style, Traditional

I don’t believe in “laying to rest” the past. There are wounds we won’t get over. There are things that happen to us that, no matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive.

Art, Believe, Hard, Past, Therapy, Wounds

The endless, useless urge to look on life comprehensively, to take a bird's-eye view of ourselves and judge the dimensions of what we have or have not done: this is life as landscape, or life as résumé. But life is incremental, and though a worthwhile life is a gathering together of all that one is, good and bad, successful and not, the paradox is that we can never really see this one thing that all of our increments (and decrements, I suppose) add up to.

Done, Eye, Successful, Suppose, View, Views

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

Close, Feels, Poetry, Way, Ways, Writing

I suppose I do believe that the greatest art consoles a wound that it creates, that art can give you the capacity to endure and respond to the pain it forces you to feel. Psychological pain, I mean.

Art, Believe, Forces, Greatest, Pain, Wound

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

Brain, Gift, Mandelstam, Nature, Untamable

There are dangers for an artist in any academic environment. Academia rewards people who know their own minds and have developed an ironclad confidence in speaking them. That kind of assurance is death for an artist.

Artist, People, Mind, Academia, Dangers

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

Call, Conform, Conforms, Neatly, Should, Suspicious

Mandelstam was an artistic genius, the sort that any century produces only a handful of.

Artistic, Century, Genius, Sort

Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom.

Precondition, Wisdom, Wonder

I don't think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation.

Doe, Expect, Language, Produce, Real, Thinking

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

Essentials, Know, Mind, Way, Weakness

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