Life & Wisdom Quote by Helen Dunmore

The modesty of “I could start” is doing a lot of work. Dunmore isn’t name-dropping Mandelstam as a badge; she’s sketching the beginning of a lineage, implying a whole map of influences without flattening them into a neat list. The phrasing feels conversational, almost offhand, but it signals something serious: if you want to understand the engine of her early writing, start where art and pressure meet.

Mandelstam is not a neutral choice. To invoke him is to invoke poetry written under surveillance, the moral cost of speaking plainly, the way lyric can become evidence. Dunmore’s “huge influence” suggests attraction to his compression and musical intelligence, but also to his stance: the poet as someone whose attention is a form of defiance. That matters for Dunmore, whose work often threads private life through public history, insisting that domestic spaces aren’t insulated from political weather.

There’s subtext in what she doesn’t say, too. Starting with Mandelstam implies other starting points exist - English lyric tradition, women poets, the contemporary scene - yet she chooses the Russian modernist who paid for words with his life. It’s a way of framing her apprenticeship as ethical as well as aesthetic: not just how to write, but what writing is for when it stops being safe.

In a literary culture that often treats influence as branding, Dunmore makes it sound like ancestry. The line quietly argues that craft is also inheritance, and that some inheritances come with a warning label.