TULSA, Oklahoma (AP) ¿ Yevgeny Yevtushenko is not a violent man. He lets words do most of his fighting.

Yevtushenko, considered by many the world's greatest living Russian poet, has spent his career turning outrage into inspiration, rifle butts into olive branches.

His poetry has exposed war atrocities, denounced anti-Semitism and tyrannical dictators, poked holes in the Iron Curtain and embraced the world.

He risked his life as a young revolutionary with "Babi Yar'', the unflinching 1961 poem that told of the slaughter of some 33,000 Jews by the Nazis and denounced the anti-Semitism that had spread throughout the Soviet Union. At 74 ¿ and after hundreds more poems ¿ he is fighting for peace, revisiting "Babi Yar" with a new work that offers hope for a resolution to the Israeli-Arab conflict. He is older, his grey hair thinner. But his blue eyes still light up when he talks about his craft. "I don't call it political poetry, I call it human rights poetry; the poetry which defends human conscience as the greatest spiritual value," he says in a recent interview with The Associated Press at his home in Tulsa.

At the height of his fame, Yevtushenko read his work in packed soccer stadiums and arenas. There was a recital in 1972 in New York's Madison Square Garden, the audience of 27,000 in Mexico City and the crowd of 200,000 in 1991 who came to listen during a failed coup attempt in Russia.

He's been to 96 countries and every state in the United States, and splits his time between Tulsa and Russia.

"He's more like a rock star than some sort of bespectacled, quiet poet," says Robert Donaldson, former president of the University of Tulsa, where Yevtushenko has taught since the early 1990s. "This is the one person on our faculty who you could say is really a historical figure."

Donaldson, a Harvard University-trained expert in Soviet policy, was instrumental in bringing Yevtushenko here. Yevtushenko's position began as a temporary arrangement and turned into a phenomenon: His classes always fill up, and some students petition to take it several semesters in a row.

The city won over Yevtushenko, too. The people here reminded him of the small Siberian town in which he grew up: close-knit, approachable and unaffected.

What also helped make up his mind was hearing "Lara's Theme" from the movie version of "Dr. Zhivago" played at an outdoor shopping mall during an early visit. The film, along with its score, was once banned in Russia.

He lives in a middle-class neighbourhood with his fourth wife, Maria, inside a simply decorated house. Posters announcing past recitals hang on the wall, next to the framed copy of him on the cover of Time magazine and pictures of his family.

Former students remain close friends. Joe Woolslayer and his wife frequently have Yevtushenko over for dinner, where conversations about Vladimir Putin, missile defense and other foreign policy matters drift into the wee morning hours.

"I've never seen anyone else that was in real life bigger than life," Woolslayer says. "Maybe John Wayne was, but I never met him." Yevtushenko has held court with politicians, writers, film directors and rock stars. He lists his inspirations, but they are too many to mention in full: the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Bob Dylan, Carl Sandburg, Joan Baez, Arthur Miller, Dr. Spock.

Boris Pasternak taught him to embrace all the world in poetry, and Robert Frost told him that when you do embrace the world at once, you sometimes have no time to embrace your own life.