Richard Wilbur and 'Things of This World'

Richard Wilbur gave a reading from his poems here a week and a half ago. There were about 150 people in Burr B when he arrived from dinner at the Signet. It may have been the incongruity of the room, the Delphic tiers of the lecture hall dwarfing the rough-hewn podium, or the poetry itself; somehow the evening was majestic and depressing, and reflective of what poetry has recently become: accomplished, public, ill-at-ease.

Respectful of his heritage, Wilbur stood patiently last week before a lot of people who like Norman Mailer and Sylvia Plath (which is alright!) and read like a poet exhausted by the age. At dinner, he'd said something about growing "older and more vulgar," but in Burr he seemed young, and strangely erudite. Introducing one of his poems, "A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa," he dismissed the question of "transcendance and acceptance" as "sounding too much like a critic," but at other moments talked offhandedly of Pascal ("The spirit doesn't have any business denying things in the realm of fact"), St. Augustine ("The soul is complete in every part of the body"), and Pasternak. It was almost as if the rude irreverence which characterizes books like Paul Carroll's anthology of The New American Poets, the things James Dickey says about "the distant and learnedly distasteful tone of Eliot or the music scholarliness of Pound" were being warded off for a while longer, if only to recall The Beautiful Changes (1947, Wilbur's first book).

Donald Hall pointed out in his preface to a collection of Contemporary American Poetry that "the typical ghastly poem of the fifties was a Wilbur poem not written by Wilbur, a poem with tired wit and obvious comparisons and nothing to keep the mind or the ear occupied." The Wilbur poem itself was exemplified by one of his finest books from that era, Things of This World (1956) which dared to include sonnets, to talk about the soul, to cope with a language unselfconscious in its striving to acknowledge the Metaphysical poets or Romanticism.

If Wilbur's style has changed surprisingly little since his first collection, published over twenty years ago, it has been because he found his voice in the beginning. Consciously poetic, nostalgic, and detached, his most recent poems in the New Yorker echo the simplicity and sensitivity of the poems for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957, and the National Book Award for Things of This World. The quiet titles of the New Yorker poems. "In the Field" and "in a Churchyard," recall two other poems from 1947, "In a Bird Sanctuary" and "A Dutch Courtyard."

Where other poets since the War, notably Lowell and John Berryman, have unceasingly sought and exhausted their techniques before arriving at masterpieces like Life Studies and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, Wilbur began and has continued in delight, while (to alter Frost's remark) wisdom has shown no signs of desertion. Here are two stanzas from "In the Field":

This field-grass brushed our legs Last night, when out we stumbled looking up,

Wading as through the cloudy dregs Of a wide, sparkling cup,

Our thrown-back heads aswim In the grand, kept appointments of the air,

Save where a pine at the sky's rim Took something from the bear.

and from "Sun and Air":

The air staggers under the sun, and heat-morasses

Flutter the birds down; wind barely climbs the hills,

Saws thin and splinters among the roots of the grasses;

All stir sickens, and falls into barn shadows, spills

Into hot hay and heat-hammered road dust, makes no sound,

Waiting the sun's siege out to collect its wills.

What has happened, I think, is more a continual process of perfecting a chosen, magical language than a process of abandoning the past.

Last week Wilbur recounted what he had been told as a grad student at Harvard, wherein we are told: "Show, don't tell." Then he read a long narrative poem in blank verse which first appeared in the New Yorker last year, and which I remember was about someone telling an insomniac how to get to sleep. What I had not remembered was that the poem explained much more, was a defining of perception and a sad discussion of his art. "What you must manage is to bring to life/ A landscape not worth looking at." "Nor must you dream of opening any door/ Until you've seen what lies beyond it."

It is this peculiar awareness of events beyond himself, of history, of classicism, of others' predicaments, that lends to Wilbur's verse an importance often absent in the work of younger poets. American poetry seems to have always been dominated by something during this century: by Eliot, or W. C. Williams, or now by confessionalism. What is so remarkable about Wilbur is the way in which he belongs to other ages than his own, without ignoring the crises of the present. In a rare political poem he read at Harvard, Wilbur spoke of President Johnson's less than gracious response to a portrait he commissioned; "Wait, sir, and see how time will render you,/ Who talk of vision but have no sight." "The Marginal Way," a poem about the dying capacity for celebration, confessed "the time's fright within me," alluding to Auschwitz, and knew some newspaper on a porch would "flap the tidings of some dirty war."

Others have written with an equal bitterness about the War, about estrangement, about the uncomfortable timidity of poets in America (I'm thinking of the anthology of Poets on Vietnam, Hayden Carruth's "On a Certain Engagement South of Seoul," or Berryman's "Formal Elegy" on the death of President Kennedy). Yet Wilbur has referred to these events in passing, as if to recognize their presence without allowing them to oppress his spirit, knowing the limits of indignations.

Finally, so little is impressive about modernity; amidst a sort of garish decline, the loss of value in life itself, and a corresponding neglect of language, poets like Charles Simic are thinking about what it would be like to take what people think Rousseau means seriously, to

Live alone killing wolves with our bare hands,

Until the last word and the last sound

Of this language I am speaking is forgotten.

But then one thinks of Wilbur, translating with near-perfection the plays of Moliere in their original rhyme and metre (Tartuffe and The Misanthrope), imitating Villon and odd old Provencal poets in a transcription of literary history, cajoling the past into colloquial forms. If anything, it is remembering forgotten languages, not forgetting the few that we so awkwardly remember.

Even his more modern lyrics are unashamed of their formality, their yearning to comprehend the universe as well as the individual and his own meagre world. In the reticent themes of Advice to a Prophet (1961) Wilbur's voice becomes laconic and impersonal. "A Summer Morning," about the pathos of a gardener and a cook experiencing the estate of their decadent employers, "possessing what the owners can but own," could have been a pathetic monologue by Randall Jarrell; most of his poems, aside from the many French translations, have no predecessor at all.

Didacticism and devotion appear strange to us now, like relatives who died a long time ago. It's not that nothing good is being written, but only that American poetry has become more diffuse and less identifiable. The fascination of its origins and of its other possibilities. Wilbur is really about the only poet writing now who refuses to relinquish language entirely to the age, but insists on keeping it "Preserved as by no hero's pains."