EP&M Online Review
Richard Wilbur: A Marvel Of Our Time
review
by
Edward Zuk
When the publication of Richard
Wilbur’s latest Collected Poems was
announced, a ripple of anticipation ran through the community of the
author’s admirers. There was something premature about Wilbur’s
first collected works, the New and
Collected Poems of 1989. Though that volume earned Wilbur
his second Pulitzer prize, no one expected him to stop writing
high-quality poems. Besides, the New and Collected Poems simply
reprinted the previous books of verse along with 15 new works without
making available the stage lyrics, children’s verse, or any
juvenilia. The new Collected
Poems: 1943 – 2004 comes closer to being the volume that
Wilbur’s many admirers have been hoping for. Along with every
poem from the 1989 collection,
Collected Poems: 1943 – 2004 includes thirteen new poems,
the recent book Mayflies
(2004), five books of children’s verse with the author’s line drawings,
and five song lyrics from his work for opera and stage. With the
possible exception of any gems that may be hidden among his juvenilia
and the glorious translations of the plays of Molière and
Racine, which are arguably the greatest translations of the 20th
century, we finally have all of Wilbur’s important works in one
collection.
This in itself would be cause for celebration, but
just as welcome is the chance to consider, once again, what a fine poet
Wilbur is. By now Wilbur’s reputation is secure, and the reviews
of this new Collected Poems
have been predictably laudatory. It is as if the book reviewers
woke up one morning, blinked their eyes, and realized that Wilbur is
among the best two or three poets of his generation, and among the best
half-dozen American poets of the 20th (and early 21st) century.
It was not always this way. On the publication of The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems
(1947), the most influential new critic of the time, Randall Jarrell,
wrote a review that argued that “most of his poetry consents too easily
to its own unncessary limitations”:
I would quote to Mr. Wilbur something queer and true
that Blake said on the same
subject: “You never know what is enough unless
you know what is more than
enough.” Mr. Wilbur never goes too far, but he
never goes far enough. In the
most serious sense of the word he is not a very
satisfactory poet. And yet he
seems the best of the quite young poets writing in
this country, poets considerably
younger than Lowell and Bishop and Shapiro and
Roethke and Schwartz; I want
to finish by admiring his best poems, not by
complaining about his limitations.
But I can’t blame his readers if they say to him in
encouraging impatient voices:
“Come on, take a chance!” If you never look
just wrong to your contemporaries
you will never look just right to posterity – every
writer has to be, to some extent,
sometimes, a law unto himself.
All this about a young poet who had just published his first volume of
poems at the age of twenty-six! In retrospect, it is Jarrell’s
criticism that seems wrong-headed and limited in spite of his praise of
Wilbur for being the most talented young poet of his generation.
Six decades of superb lyrics now make it impossible to view Wilbur as a
poet who is not “satisfactory,” or to argue that his poems do not look
right to his readers. Thanks to Jarrell’s influence as a critic,
a view that Wilbur is a limited or curtailed talent has shadowed his
work for decades. The time now seems ripe for us to agree that
Wilbur has risen far above these alleged limitations, and that it is
time to put Jarrell’s essay to rest.
But as strange as Jarrell’s remarks read today, he did foresee an
important quality of Wilbur’s work. Wilbur is a poet who has been
happy to confine himself to one genre, rarely venturing outside of
it. He is not a philosophical poet, in that readers cannot look
at his poetry for the articulation of an original and comprehensive
view of life in the way that they turn to the verse of Wordsworth, say,
or Yeats. His poetry does not accumulate images and ideas so that
each poem stands as a part of a greater whole in the manner of George
Herbert’s The Temple.
Judging from this latest Collected
Poems, the desire to write an epic or book-length poem does not
appear ever to have seized him, nor has he devoted his poems to a cause
outside of poetry or to a political movement. I cannot sense a
mythic impulse in his work, by which I mean an attempt to discover the
symbols that define his country or to forge a national
consciousness. And in spite of Wilbur’s superb translations of
Moliere’s and Racine’s plays and his collaboration with Lillian Hellman
on the libretto of Leonard Bernstein’s opera Candide, his genius is not
essentially a theatrical one, and he has not produced any original
dramas that he has released to the public. He has also tended to
shy away from narratives (though the early “Sonnet” and later “A Fable”
are among a handful of welcome exceptions to this generalization), so
that his reputation has been formed almost solely through dramatic
monologues and lyrics. But what lyrics! In my opinion, and
in the opinion of many others, they stand as one of the lasting joys of
20th-century verse.
Within this limitation (if indeed a devotion to lyrics is a limitation
when one can write ones as distinguished as “The Beautiful Changes” or
“Love Calls Us to Things of This World”), Wilbur has done much to
expand the resources of our poetry. It may seem strange to hear
Wilbur spoken as an innovator, but few American poets have done more to
introduce new strains into the national literature. Readers of
EP&M Online will recognize Wilbur as one of the brave figures who
kept metre and rhyme alive during the dominance of free verse in the
1960’s and 70’s. He did so by a restless experimentation.
One often hears of various writers being called a “poet’s poet”; in the
same way, Wilbur is a “formalist’s poet formalist poet.” A quick
glance through this new Collected
Poems reveals Wilbur’s mastery of most of the standards of the
formal poet’s repetoire: couplets and rhymed tercets, ballad
stanzas, variously rhymed quatrains, sonnets, blank verse, rondeaus,
ballades, original rhyming stanzas of five to eight lines, and every
other staple of English verse. The sonnets, incidentally, include
a Petrarchan one (with the full title of “A Miltonic Sonnet for Mr.
Johnson on His Refusal of Peter Hurd’s Official Portrait”), a
Spenserian one (“Praise in Summer”), and – if one includes the
translations – many in the French style, where a rhymed couplet begins
the sestet. The poem entitled “O,” which stares across the page
in these Collected Poems at
another lyric titled “&,” is a Petrarchan sonnet with only two
rhymes, a tour de force which falls just short of one of Sidney’s
sonnets, which reduced the rhymes to two words, “light” and “night.”
This delight in poetic form has taken Wilbur in some unexpected
directions. “The Lilacs” and “Junk,” for example, are successful
adaptations of Anglo-Saxon meter with its four-beat lines, caesuras
falling in the middle of the lines, and alliteration of key words,
though Wilbur with his characteristic grace makes these lines sound
polished rather than thumping. I cannot recall another American
poet, including Pound, who has handled accentual verse with such
facility. “Sleepless at Crown Point” is a rather ornate attempt
at haiku, and more recently Wilbur has turned his hand to another
Japanese form, the 31-syllable tanka, which can be thought of as a
haiku with two 7-syllable lines attached at the end. More
interesting, to my mind, are his attempts to invent new forms out of
the old, for no other apparent reason than the pleasure of doing
so. Wilbur’s lasting contribution to the haiku lies in
transforming it into an engaging stanza form, complete with end rhyme:
This, if Japanese,
Would represent grey boulders
Walloped by rough seas
So that, here or there,
The balked water tossed its froth
Straight into the air. . . (“Thyme Flowering
among Rocks”)
The reference to the Japanese viewpoint raises the form of the poem
into something like a metaphysical conceit. Or consider the
following verse form. Any formal poet can write a quatrain
rhyming abba, but how many would dream of rhyming the end of the second
line with the first or second syllable of the third, as Wilbur does in
“A Sketch”:
Into the lower right
Square of the window frame
There came
with scalloped
flight . . .
This pattern continues for another nine stanzas so effortlessly that
one forgets what a leap of the imagination it takes to envision a new
form, let alone carry it to completion. We need a measure of
“formal intelligence,” a way to calculate a poet’s ability to think and
communicate solely through the architecture of his poems, to fully
appreciate this aspect of Wilbur’s genius. Certainly, his
understanding of poetic structure dwarfs that of most contemporary
poets and asks to be compared with that of the line of great formalists
from Sir Philip Sidney to Wilbur’s friend at Harvard, Robert
Frost.
Combined with this delight in form is a novel approach to metre, one
that Wilbur shares with James Merrill, who was five years his
junior. Both poets wrote extensively in loose iambics in which
there are so many inversions and extra unstressed syllables that the
lines seem to float gracefully on their own cadences. This verse
flows and ebbs as naturally as speech, as in the first stanza of “A
Simile for Her Smile”:
Your smiling, or the hope, the thought of it,
Makes in my mind such pause and abrupt ease
As when the highway bridgegates fall,
Balking the hasty traffic, which must sit
On each side massed and staring, while
Deliberately the drawbridge starts to rise . . .
One can easily pick out the phrases that break the metre – “Makes in my
mind,” “abrupt ease,” Balking the hasty traffic,” “each side massed,”
“Deliberately” – that are placed so that the iambs never quite have
time to establish themselves. The overall effect is to break the
steady beat of the metre, allowing the lines a fluidity or suppleness
that is rare in English verse. In this poem, and in dozens of
others, Wilbur has hit on a variation of the iamb that sounds natural,
polished, and convincingly modern.
Innovations in form and metre, of course are not the type of
experimentation that we associate with the 20th century. It was
Wilbur’s fate to have come of age in an era in which poets pushed their
experiments and discoveries to extremes, and to have to be judged
against the violent outbursts of Pound, Eliot, Yeats, and other high
Modernists. Wilbur delights in extending or playing with
established forms, but he does not attempt to implode them or to push
them to their furthest limit and beyond as Eliot did in The Waste Land, say, or as Pound
would do in The Cantos.
In reading through the Collected
Poems, I was surprised to see how strongly Wilbur resisted the
Modernism that dominated his youth and formative years. His work
is virtually untouched by the poetic techniques of the avant-garde,
that cluster of innovations that include montage, imagism, surrealism,
the breaking of syntax, fragmentation, and stream of
consciousness. Seen in retrospect, Wilbur’s work forms an
important part of a later group of poets who quietly rejected the
excesses of Modernism and whose works, taken as a whole, act as a
correction to the violence and extremism of its aesthetics.
The difference between the Modernists and Wilbur’s
practice can be seen in their treatments of spirituality in their
verse. The view that emerges from the works of Eliot, Pound,
Yeats, Crane, Robinson Jeffers, and other Modernist poets is that the
life of faith involves a great and continual struggle, one which is
often individual, paradoxical, and shaped by a wide array of traditions
culled from both Europe and Asia. Donne and Hopkins were admired
as models for religious poets – both are as well known for their
questionings and doubts as for their faith. The spirit, for the
Modernists, was something that was often elusive, and nearly always
difficult. Turning from these views to Wilbur’s “The Beacon,”
then, comes as something of a shock. Here one finds a God who, if
not always available, still acts as a beacon of hope through the
turbulations of the world:
Founded on rock and facing the night-fouled sea
A beacon blinks at its own brilliance,
Over and over with cutlass gaze
Solving the Gordian waters . . .
. . . but look:
The beacon-blaze unsheathing turns
The face of darkness pale
And now with one grand chop gives clearance to
Our human visions . . .
There is much darkness in Wilbur’s vision here, but the central image
of God as a beacon of aid is reassuring. The presence of angels
in the laundry in “Love Calls Us to Things of This World,” too, reveals
a vision of the sacred in the everyday world, a presence which can
delight us and surprise us with its immediacy. “The Beautiful
Changes” also, I think, expresses this view of the divine, as do the
final lines from “A World without Objects Is a Sensible
Emptiness”: “the spirit’s right / Oasis, light incarnate.”
Running parallel to this deep faith in God is another theme: a
pessimistic view of the limits of the human mind, one which cuts deeper
than any Modernist explication of this idea of which I am aware.
Wilbur is drawn by types of semi-consciousness such as dreams, the
state between sleep and waking, and even the paranormal, not for their
potential to open grand visions or spiritual vistas, but for their
ability to reveal the ambiguity and weakness inherent in all human
perception. His long poem “Walking to Sleep” (four pages in the
Collected Poems) contains the following advice:
Try to remember this: what you project
Is what you will perceive; what you perceive
With any passion, be it love or terror,
May take on whims and powers of its own.
Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection
Will serve you best . . .
The world we perceive is, at least in part, a product of our
imagination, but even these perceptions lie beyond our control.
The implications of this belief are immense. Wilbur here suggests
that we can never truly know the world, since our perceptions are our
own creations. Wallace Stevens raised similar concerns, but not
to the same extent. While Stevens doubts poetry’s ability to
depict the world accurately, Wilbur questions the very nature of
perception of the human mind. “The Bat,” “A Chronic Condition,”
and “The Sleepwalker” provide further examples of Wilbur’s skepticism
that the mind can ever fully perceive reality. In his comments on
another longer poem, “Lying,” Wilbur has argued that the act of lying
is creative, similar to the act of writing a poem. Only a writer
who is deeply suspicious of the mind’s ability to perceive the world
truly could make such a declaration.
Of course, in other ways Wilbur is a heir to the Modernists. I
find it difficult to imagine “Two Voices in a Meadow” being written
without the shade of Yeats peering over the poet’s shoulder, and other
Wilburian staples such as “Sonnet,” “The Ride,” and “In Trackless
Woods” receive my vote as the greatest Frostian poems not written by
Frost himself. But there is a stronger sense in which Wilbur is
swerving away from Modernist aesthetics. In rereading the Collected Poems, I thought I
detected the beginnings of one those shifts in sensibility that
revitalizes poetry every two or three generations as a new group of
writers resurrects modes of verse that had, for far too long, been laid
aside or neglected. For Wilbur, this meant a quieter and subtler
poetry, one that returned to the old beauties of metre and rhyme, a
simple and deep joy in the presence of God, suspicion of the power of
human imagination and perception, and a consolation in the everyday –
styles and themes that mark his departure from the constellation of
Modernist poets that had come before him.
For this reason, we must look for Wilbur’s sources and influences in
poets from before the 20th century. Daniel Mark Epstein, in an
essay published recently in The New
Criterion, has argued that Wilbur is a metaphysical poet,
suggesting that Wilbur is both a spiritual heir to the verse of Donne
and Herbert and arguing explicitly that he is a poet obsessed with
philosophical questions that have, for the most part, been set aside by
the philosophers of our age. Epstein is, I think, right in the
main, though his view requires some qualifications. When I read
Wilbur’s verse against the true philosophical poets in our tradition –
Milton, say, or Shelley, or Stevens, or even an unoriginal thinker like
Pope – I can’t help but notice the distance that separates their
prolonged campaigns of system-building or questionings and Wilbur’s
shorter sorties into the philosophic realm. Wilbur is more like a
La Rochefoucauld in verse – a poet interested in philosophy with highly
intriguing observations and gleanings, but whose work does not quite
amount to a full-blown metaphysics. Nor is he quite a
metaphysical poet in the literary sense. I can’t read Donne’s
poetry without noticing how different it is from Wilbur’s: the
aggressiveness, the outrageousness, and the rough metre (Ben Jonson is
said to have remarked that, for the breaking of the metre, Donne
“deserved hanging”) are all foreign to Wilbur’s sensibility, though at
times Wilbur does approach the deep sense of peace of George Herbert’s
spiritual poetry, a remark which I intend as very high praise
indeed.
Wilbur’s polished style and subtle wit do not derive from the late
Renaissance of English poetry, but they do remind me of the polish and
courtly wit of the 16th century and early 17th. Lyrics like “A
Simile for Her Smile,” in which Wilbur praises a smile by comparing it
to the raising of a bridge to let a paddlewheel pass by, reveal his
impulse to turn poetry to compliments garnished by elaborate
conceits. Throughout the Collected
Poems, this mode of poetry is always intruding into the lines:
Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to
lose
For a moment all that it touches back to
wonder. (“The Beautiful Changes”)
“The Catch” is another, more recent, example. Not only does
Wilbur adapt this approach from the Renaissance, but his style –
erudite, playful in its details and puns, and prone to older turns of
phrase like “ever to sunder” – would be at home in a poem written by
the sonneteers of the 1590’s. It is one of the oddities of
literary history that a poet from the United States in the 20th century
and early part of the 21st should turn to this stream of English verse
which, one might think, had little to offer an age filled with
horrors. In these qualities he resembles another poet who stands
on the fringes of the metaphysical school, but who is as worth reading
as any of them: Andrew Marvell.
The parallels between Marvell’s and Wilbur’s verse
are striking, and they allow us to predict, perhaps, the lasting place
that Wilbur has carved for himself in American poetry. Both poets
have proven to be masters of the short or medium-length lyric, which
they write with flair and intelligence. Both poets have shown
that they are incapable of writing a bad poem, and even their minor
work contains some image or turn of phrase that makes them
worthwhile. Both have produced political poetry that is highly
critical of their societies, but which is oblique rather than direct in
its criticisms; in neither case did the unrest of the world at large
(the Puritan revolution and the regicide of Charles I for Andrew
Marvell, the horrors of World War II and the Vietnam War for Wilbur)
prevent them from writing beautiful poems. Both delight in
incorporating philosophical ideas in their lyrics, which they use to
illuminate their moods and intuitions. Both have produced
measured phrases as moving as any in the language, making their poems
into perfect anthology pieces: “To His Coy Mistress,” “The
Garden,” and “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” by
Marvell have delighted readers for four centuries now, and their appeal
appears to be permanent. It is easy to predict a similar fate for
Wilbur’s best-known lyrics such as “Love Calls Us to Things of This
World,” “Ceremony,” and “The Beautiful Changes,” as well as for recent
or lesser-known poems such as “Mayflies,” “The Ride,” “The Beacon,” “In
a Country Graveyard” (a personal favourite), “Exeunt,” “Two Voices
in Meadow,” and “A Simile for her Smile.” As our age passes
into history, Wilbur’s will be one of the voices which represents us to
our descendents, who will read his lines and credit our era with more
beauty and elegance than we deserve.
Edward Zuk