Criticism > Poetry > Wilbur, Richard - Mary Kinzie (essay date March 1977)

Wilbur, Richard - Mary Kinzie (essay date March 1977)

Mary Kinzie (essay date March 1977)

SOURCE: Kinzie, Mary. “The Cheshire Smile: On Richard Wilbur.” American Poetry Review 6, no. 4 (March 1977): 17-20.

[In the following essay, the author writes about Wilbur's The Mind-Reader, the writer favorably compares Wilbur to Robert Browning.]

The title poem of Richard Wilbur's new book is a dramatic monologue spoken by a gifted but dissipating magus who tries to seem as much a charlatan as Robert Browning's Mr. Sludge, the medium. Both Wilbur's and Browning's personae have some deep, interior bonds (although Sludge's are more tenuous) with spiritual truths, with resemblances and analogues, and with that realm in which spirit and matter mingle, psychology or memory. It is natural—perhaps it would be safer to say, it is a compulsion—on the part of many critics to wonder whether any poem about something else is really a poem about poetry. Browning is less amenable to such a synthesis...

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