Criticism > Poetry > Wilbur, Richard - Robert Boyers (essay date spring 1970)

Wilbur, Richard - Robert Boyers (essay date spring 1970)

Robert Boyers (essay date spring 1970)

SOURCE: Boyers, Robert. “On Richard Wilbur.” Salmagundi: A Quarterly of the Humanities and Social Sciences, no. 12 (spring 1970).

[In the following essay, the author reviews Walking to Sleep and finds aspects of Wilbur's poetry “fundamentally dishonest” while acknowledging Wilbur's important contribution to American poetry.]

Richard Wilbur's poetry has consistently provided us with so many pleasures that one must feel almost ungrateful to question the premises upon which he has founded his art. So serene and altogether orderly a style would hardly seem possible to us today were it not for his exemplary presence, and the epithet “classical” inevitably forms at the lips when one thinks of his characteristic virtues, so often remarked by others: poise, tact, formal and metrical regularity, musicality of diction, ingenuity of phrasing, and a basic human decency that permits him to deal...

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