It was once asserted by a drama critic that Richard Wilbur's translations of Molière are so good we don't deserve them. Extravagance in this matter is not at all out of place. Consider the following indisputable facts: among the modern translators of the Homeric epics one must name T. E. Lawrence, Robert Fitzgerald, Richmond Lattimore, and Robert Fagles to head a list that would be long to the point of tiresomeness. But for Molière we have but one indispensable translator in English, who has not merely outdistanced any contemporary rash enough to attempt the task, but has quite simply made all previous translations obsolete. I own a Modern Library edition of six Molière plays that I picked up in an army camp in Japan in 1945. Waldo Frank, the editor, carelessly or cunningly fails to reveal the identity of the translators, who have uniformly turned Molière's verse into prose. And it's a good thing for their reputations and their souls that they remain unknown. I seem to remember from college days a play of Molière's translated by Louis Untermeyer into something like doggerel verse. But the completeness of Richard Wilbur's preeminence, his uncontested supremacy, is so remarkable that I cannot find anything comparable outside of North's Plutarch, the importance and durability of which got a little help from Shakespeare.

It's not easy to overestimate this achievement. The great actor, director, teacher, and critic Jean-Louis Barrault, in a lecture given in Edinburgh in 1948, said that it had been his habit to keep three books on a bedside table. These were, in his words, “the Bible which contains our sources, Racine with his artistic beauty, and Shakespeare, which contains life.” He then added, “today I should like to add a fourth: Molière.” And as Wilbur's translations and scholarly introductions have made wonderfully clear, Molière is no mere writer of farce. His comedies hover gracefully above chasms of appalling darkness and grave consequence, touching sometimes delicately but sometimes piercingly upon those vanities, gullibilities, follies, and corruptions to which even the best of us are subject. If Richard Wilbur had done nothing else, his place as our solitary transmutor of Molière's French into an equivalent golden English would assure him an honorable and distinguished immortality. I can think, in fact, of only one similar case in which the translator's art rivals the glory of the original, a singular triumph of the Victorian era, enduring beyond pitiful attempts at displacement by the likes of Robert Graves.

But it ought to be clear to almost anyone that Wilbur's achievement as translator could never have come to pass without the skills he made his own in the course of becoming the unmatched poet that he is. That process is a mysterious one, if for no other reason than that it entails the mingling and interpenetration of three more or less autonomous regions: the visible world, the human mind, and the not always sufficient resources of a language. Let's begin with an Emersonian relish of the visible world, which, for all its visibility sometimes appears as a cypher or an encoded language that refers beyond itself. For one thing it seems to embody our deepest feelings; to remind us of, or even to express, joys and sorrows, disappointments and hopes. “What angels,” asks Emerson in his essay “Nature,” “invented these splendid ornaments, these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, this ocean of water beneath, this firmament of earth between? this zodiac of lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates, this fourfold year?” And later he states, “Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind. … The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors … the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” But in addition the visible world seems to speak in cryptic images of something beyond both itself and the mind, something not imposed by our needs or desires, and which suggests an order of existence that normally evades us.

If the poet is Richard Wilbur, it is not enough to say that he is in love with the visible world. He is in love with words, which, given a moment's thought, are also encoded. The lover of words seeks for their hidden worth, their forgotten meanings, their playfulness, trickiness, the way they can make us say more than we intended or than we knew we meant or than we knew we knew. “Words,” says the music and literary critic Charles Rosen, “will not sit still. They change their meanings, shift from praise to blame, revise their associations.” They are as evasive as the world they endeavor to describe, so that both the world of language and the visible world, to the thoughtful mind, are fugitive and unstable. How, then, is any poet to address his task? Once again a hint is offered by Emerson: “the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility.”

This is a recipe, a program, a procedure Richard Wilbur has taken to heart in poem after poem, but it is the very template and paradigm of one particular poem of his, called “An Event.” It is a poem, like many Wilbur poems, of mixed description and meditation. It concerns a flock of birds, rising from a field, convening in the air in a loose formation as, in the poem's words, “They roll / Like a drunken fingerprint across the sky!” That alone is the sort of trouvaille almost any poet would rejoice in, and settle for. Not, however, Richard Wilbur, who watches the birds scatter and disappear while he, pausing in pre-Socratic meditation on the puzzle of The One and The Many, keeps trying to apprehend and give utterance to what he has just seen. The poem's final stanza reads:

Delighted with myself and with the birds,
I set them down and give them leave to be.
It is by words and the defeat of words,
Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt,
That for a flying moment one may see
By what cross-purposes the world is dreamt.

It seems to me that in this poem, as in so many others, all of Emerson's scruples and directives have been met, and with a combined grace and humility.

No poet, however much admired, is without hostile critics; and of course sometimes the hostility is generated chiefly by the praise bestowed on him, undeservedly in the view of his detractors. But I mean to set aside the envious, together with the views of the uncomprehending, a category of indeterminate but probably enormous size. I want instead to focus on a claim sometimes made with civility, and not as a complaint, that Wilbur appears to be shy about his intimacy with the reader. He has himself addressed this topic, and I can do no better than allow him to speak. He has declared: “I've always agreed with Eliot's assertion that poetry ‘is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality,’ and I suppose that it has been temperamentally convenient for me to do so. I've thought of the poem … as a ‘box to be opened,’ a created object, an altar-cloth, Japanese garden or ship of death. Not a message or confession.”

It has seemed a truth dear to the hearts of schoolteachers of English that poems contain messages, in much the same way that legislators send messages by instituting laws, and judges by handing down maximum sentences. It is a view of poetry wonderful in its simplistic belief that poems are cheap allegories, imparting instruction and moral commandments. The message of Oedipus Rex according to this doctrine is Don't kill your daddy and marry your mommy. As for confessional poetry, the best of that must be George Herbert's.

But Richard Wilbur has some further observations to make on this topic:

We do inevitably treat any poem in part, as the utterance of a person, and react to it as we would to a person. A poem should “bring the whole soul of man into activity,” and we look in a poem as in a conversation for signs of passion, intellect, judgment, and the harmony of these faculties. It is hard, in life, to read these signs, because we are obliged to take ourselves as normal, and because modes of expression vary. In poetry, it is both easier and harder to assess the signs of the soul. Easier because all is verbalized, and because literary convention and tradition are being employed, defied, or both. Harder, because poetic technique translates all signs into new and condensed language, and because “acting a part” is not only legitimate but unavoidable.

That seems to me a sane and subtle answer to the problem.

How, then, are we to assess the quality and degree of Wilbur's achievement as a poet? Casting about for some yardstick I recalled a preface/apologia written by W. H. Auden when, in 1945, he issued, somewhat prematurely, a volume titled The Collected Poems of W. H. Auden, wherein he stated, “In the eyes of every author, I fancy, his own past work falls into four classes. First, the pure rubbish which he regrets ever having conceived; second—for him the most painful—the good ideas which his incompetence or impatience prevented from coming to much … ; third, the pieces he has nothing against except their lack of importance; these must inevitably form the bulk of any collection since, were he to limit it to the fourth class alone, to those poems for which he is honestly grateful, his volume would be too depressingly slim.”

It is an interesting, modest, and candid statement, and one with which I would not quarrel as it applies to the whole of Auden's work. I think the same might be said of such eminences as Yeats, Pound, Tennyson, Hardy, Coleridge, Dickinson, and Graves. On the other hand, there are a few poets of whom it can be maintained that virtually every poem from their hand is indispensable. Eliot is of that kind, as is George Herbert, to which short list may be added Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, Charles Baudelaire, and, with deep delight and gratitude, Richard Wilbur.