Wilbur, Richard - Bruce Michelson (essay date 1990)

Bruce Michelson (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: Michelson, Bruce. “Words.” In Wilbur’s Poetry: Music in a Scattering Time, pp. 36-60. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Michelson explores word-play in several of Wilbur's poems, including “The Regatta” and “Year's End”.]

While we acknowledge his erudition and urbanity, we regretfully liken his mildness to the amiable normality of the bourgeois citizen. Emergencies are absent in his poems; he is unseduced by the romantic equation of knowledge and power; he seldom rails at the world. Suspicious of grandiose gestures, of parading the ego, he mediates experience through reason.1

He is a bell too conscious of its clapper, clapper-happy. Pert but proper, always safe rather than sorry, his poetry is completely without risks, a prize pupil's performance. His ideas are always...

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