Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman
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Full Name and Common Aliases
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Christian Wiman's full name is Christian Rohlfsen Wiman.
Birth and Death Dates
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Born: 1966 (exact date not publicly disclosed)
Died: still alive
Nationality and Profession(s)
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Christian Wiman is an American poet, critic, and theologian. He currently serves as the editor of Poetry magazine.
Early Life and Background
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Wiman was born in 1966 to a Swedish mother and a Norwegian father. He grew up in a Christian household but later became disillusioned with Christianity due to his experiences with cancer and its treatment. Despite this, he continued to explore faith and spirituality through his writing.
Major Accomplishments
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Editor of Poetry magazine (2013-2022)
Poet laureate for the State of Indiana (2005-2009)
* MacArthur Fellowship recipient (2006)
Notable Works or Actions
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Wiman's poetry collections include:
1. Hard Night (1996)
2. Powder House (2000)
3. Fire and Jordan (2005)
4. Ambition and Survival: An American Poet in the Middle East (2017)
In addition to his poetry, Wiman has also written essays on faith, literature, and culture.
Impact and Legacy
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Wiman's work as a poet and critic has been widely praised for its lyricism, nuance, and depth. His editorship of Poetry magazine helped shape the direction of American poetry in the 2010s.
As a theologian, Wiman explores complex issues like faith, doubt, and spirituality through his writing. He is known for challenging readers to reevaluate their assumptions about Christianity and its role in modern society.
Why They Are Widely Quoted or Remembered
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Wiman's quotes and writings are widely quoted due to his:
1. Intellectual honesty: Wiman tackles complex, contentious topics with candor and thoughtfulness.
2. Literary talent: His poetry is celebrated for its lyricism and emotional depth, while his essays demonstrate a mastery of language and form.
3. Influence on American poetry: As editor of Poetry magazine, Wiman played a significant role in shaping the direction of American poetry in recent years.
Overall, Christian Wiman's unique blend of literary talent, intellectual honesty, and spiritual exploration has made him one of the most widely quoted and respected voices in contemporary literature.
Quotes by Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman's insights on:
To be truly alive is to feel one’s ultimate existence within one’s daily existence. All those trivial, frittering anxieties acquire, even if only briefly, a lightness, a rightness, a meaning. So long as anxiety is merely something to be alleviated, it is not life, or we are not alive enough to experience it as such.
When life is thriving in us, we crave to get beyond it: experience that takes us out of ourselves, poetry that articulates a shape and space for the inexpressible, prayer that obliterates self-consciousness for the sake of God.
If to be an artist is to be someone upon whom nothing is lost, as Henry James said, then it follows that to be an artist is to be in some permanent sense professionally detached.
To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality.
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.
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.
Faith is not some hard, unchanging thing you cling to through the vicissitudes of life. Those who try to make it into this are destined to become brittle, shatterable creatures. Faith never grows harder, never so deviates from its nature and becomes actually destructive, than in the person who refuses to admit that faith is change.
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.