Russian Poetry Quotes

The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called "Rusia en 1931." This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and [Cesar] Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist.

[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.

I haven't shifted language. I'm writing in English because I like it. I'm a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I'm still writing in Russian.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' "Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.

And Mandelstam says a poet - you go down to the shore and you see an unlikely looking from a bottle from the past, you open it. Mandelstam says, "It's okay to do so. I'm not reading someone else's mail. It was addressed to whoever found it. I found it, therefore it's addressed to me."

There are a lot of things about Russian culture, art, music, photography and literature that I'm love with.

Samuel Marshak was one of the founders of modern Russian children's literature. Soviet children used to know his poems by heart, but only since glasnost have American editors shown any interest in issuing his poems here.

Russian literature in the hands of an artist such as Pushkin reminds one constantly of Greek art. Pushkin’s eight lines could only have been written either in Russian or Greek.

I didn't ever consider poetry the province exclusively of English and American literature and I discovered a great amount in reading Polish poetry and other Eastern European poetry and reading Russian poetry and reading Latin American and Spanish poetry and I've always found models in those other poetries of poets who could help me on my path.

I read Russian literature a lot.

I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.

Even though you picture Russians as stoic, their language is really poetic.

There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.