[In the following essay, Michelson explicates the poetic themes of Wilbur's collection, The Mind Reader, focusing on how the collection will endure because the individual poems lend themselves so much to new readings.]

When in came out in 1976, The Mind-Reader didn't change any minds. As Richard Wilbur's latest collection of poems, the book was reviewed about eighteen times in predictable ways: people who had understood and liked his work before had more nice things to say (William Pritchard, for example, in the Hudson Review), and people who were stuck on the old idea that Wilbur is a safe soul, somebody to be arch about, did their usual dance. Wilbur has spent thirty years sharpening our sense of irony and showing us that wit and passionate intensity can have everything to do with each other. That is the kind of cause that divides people for good—and so it is no surprise that some of The Mind-Reader's readers found there the same old Wilbur they expected.

There are, however, some new sides to the Wilbur who shows himself here. One thing that is new is the book's defiant surfaces. The poems are as witty and elegant and deadly serious as ever, but the collection, taken altogether, seems to stand up against every kind of poet-chic, as if Wilbur meant to strut around for a moment, with an angry glint in his eye, wearing the “bourgeois” mask which his detractors hang on him. The defiance runs cover to cover, literally: the jacket front shows a silhouette of somebody sitting with legs crossed at a café table, evidently recollecting in too much tranquility; the back is a photograph of The Poet in the Parlor, looking tweedy and comfy and sane—looking all wrong. Inside, there is a poem about politics (the first since his crack about President Johnson ten years ago), telling the student strikers of 1970 to do more talking and thinking than rock throwing (still an unfashionable idea, given all the effort now to romanticize those hard years). There are some lines called “What's Good for the Soul Is Good for Sales,” a punch at the morose confessionalism which gets so much play:

If fictive music fails your lyre, confess—
Though not, of course, to any happiness.
So be it tristful, tell us what you choose:
Hangover, Nixon on the TV news,
God's death, memory of your rocking-horse,
Entropy, housework, Buchenwald, divorce,
Those damned flamingoes in your neighbor's yard …
All hangs together if you take it hard

We get a marriage toast that celebrates marriage, we get riddles and jokes, tour de force translations of Villon, Du Bellay, Vosnesensky, and others, poems about Johnny Appleseed and his apples, the Fourth of July, milkweed, mushrooms, shallots, all of them graceful, well-mannered, and outwardly tranquil celebrations of love, light, life. But the readers who are usually irked by that sort of thing will be especially upset with “Cottage Street, 1953,” which seems to have irreverent things to say about Sylvia Plath.

“Cottage Street” is, according to Wilbur, a “composite” recollection of the young woman Wilbur actually knew. The setting is the Wellesley home of Edna Ward, Wilbur's mother-in-law and a friend of “frightened Mrs. Plath,” who is here for tea with her “pale, slumped daughter” recovering from a suicide attempt. But there is nothing snide about the poem. It is meant to recall the powerlessness that Wilbur felt (and must still feel), with his hard-won faith in the order of things, to speak of that faith to such abject despair:

It is my office to exemplify
The published poet in his happiness,
Thus cheering Sylvia, who has wished to die;
But half-ashamed, and impotent to bless,
I am a stupid life-guard who has found,
Swept to his shallows by the tide, a girl
Who, far from shore, has been immensely drowned, …
How large is her refusal; and how slight
The genteel chat whereby we recommend
Life, of a summer afternoon, despite
The brewing dusk which hints that it may end.

Wilbur has been in that brewing dusk before, knows the breadth and intensity of Sylvia's night—but what can he do? The poem ends by contrasting the death of Edna Ward, at eighty-eight, with Sylvia's suicide; and these are the lines which anger people. Mrs. Ward dies,

The thin hand reaching out, the last word love,
Outliving Sylvia who, condemned to live,
Shall study for a decade, as she must,
To state at last her brilliant negative
In poems free and helpless and unjust.

The bluntness is surprising, but no poet writing in this language has ever chosen his words more carefully than Wilbur, and “unjust” is exactly what he means. His sympathy for the desperate, brilliant young woman runs deep, but finally he states his positive, as he must, his faith in an obscure but fundamental goodness in life. He turns away from a vision which is ontologically “unjust,” meaning faithless as well as unfair. This is the first occasion when Wilbur in any of his poems has spoken directly about a fellow poet, and it seems to me as gentle and just an observation as anyone who believes can make about anyone who doesn't. But in these touchy times a small noise like that is enough to stampede Ms. Plath's wild hierophants. Perhaps the poem had to be written; perhaps Wilbur had to orient himself in public under the shadow that she currently casts. Yet “Cottage Street” has surely put off people who might otherwise read Wilbur with more care.

Close reading is what Wilbur still requires, not because his poems have grown more obscure and idiosyncratic. The rich surfaces have grown rougher and wilder, the resolutions are down deeper and take a steadier gaze to find. But the poems still work like Wyeth's paintings: we enter into familiar worlds full of light and fresh air—and then we find that there are tigers aprowl in the tall grass and that the safe artist who dreams these safe landscapes has been farther out on the edge than most of the sword-dancers we have heard about. The life-and-death business is still the struggle of the imagination to make sense of the world's turbulence; the difference is that the turbulence is more intense. The Johnny Appleseed poem, “John Chapman,” is about the sexuality and wildness that can be neither repressed nor let go. They have to be understood, praised, and at the same time, transformed. These are the last two stanzas:

Out of your grave, John Chapman, in Fort Wayne
May you arise, and flower, and come true.
We meanwhile, being of a spotted strain
And born into a wilder land than you,
Expecting less of natural tree or man
And dubious of working out the brute,
Affix such hopeful scions as we can
To the rude, forked, and ever savage root.

“The Shallot” is likewise about a refined beauty rising somehow from savage roots, and it too seems (fittingly) earthier than usual, as Wilbur's botany poems go:

The full cloves
Of your buttocks, the convex
Curve of your bell, the curved
Cleft of your sex—
Out of this corn
That's planted in strong thighs
The slender stem and radiant
Flower rise.

The best use of this new roughness turns up in the mushroom poem, “Children of Darkness,” a lyric about those rootless, nasty-looking things that grow in the deep shade, feeding on death and rot. Wilbur has written about ugly things before, dead dogs and vultures; but he has never been this lurid before:

An elm-bole cocks a bloody ear;
In the oak's shadow lies a strew of brains.
Wherever, after the deep rains,
The woodlands are morose and reek of punk,
These gobbets grow—
Tongue, lobe, hand, hoof or butchered toe
Amassing on the fallen branch half-sunk
In leaf-mold, or the riddled trunk.

And so on, through “shameless phalloi,” “to whose slimed heads come carrion flies.” The beauty in all this horror is that these ugly things break death down so that life can rise up again; they keep nature new and fresh, and a steady, serious look at them can do the same thing for us:

Gargoyles is what they are at worst, and should
They preen themselves
On being demons, ghouls, or elves,
The holy chiaroscuro of the wood
Still would embrace them. They are good.

There is one perfect, classic haiku in the book, “Sleepless at Crown Point,” which catches Wilbur's whole struggle in twelve words:

All night, this headland
Lunges into the rumpling
Capework of the wind.

For three decades Wilbur's head-land, that wakeful, witty sensibility of his, has been lunging into dark, vaporous, disheveled places. Everything takes place on the border between light and shadow; it is no good if you go to sleep at your crown point and never go sleepless into the dark; it is no good if you go out there and never come back again. Sometimes the escape from the darkness is a narrow one. The collection's title poem is a dramatic monologue (the first long one that Wilbur has published), from the kind of sensibility that Wilbur's almost is—that is, one that hasn't found its way back. The speaker is a heavy-drinking Italian with a powerful intuition: he is a charlatan and a desperate man because he has lost the battle with that intuition and it has swept him off into solipsism, obsession, confusion:

What can be wiped from memory? Not the least
Meanness, obscenity, humiliation,
Terror which made you clench your eyes, or pulse
Of happiness which quickened your despair.
Nothing can be forgotten, as I am not
Permitted to forget.
                                                  It was not far
From that to this—this corner café table
Where, with my lank grey hair and vatic gaze,
I sit and drink at the receipt of custom.
They come here, day and night, so many people:
Sad women of the quarter, dressed in black,
As to a black confession; blinking clerks
Who half-suppose that Taurus ruminates
Upon their destinies; men of affairs
Down from Milan to clear it with the magus
Before they buy or sell some stock or other;
My fellow drunkards; …

That man on the front of the dust jacket, the silhouette at the café table, has Wilbur's shape, as he should; for this mind worn down with detail and misfortune and all those perceptions which can break anyone who seeks the “resonance in all their fretting” is Wilbur, the other side of the man—not simply the visionary that he struggles against becoming, but the visionary that, for all controlled surfaces, he always is.

The story goes that Randall Jarrell “discovered” Frost for himself while Jarrell was soaking in a New Jersey swimming pool, daydreaming about the New England woods, and coming back again and again to the rightness of Frost's lines. The Mind-Reader is the same kind of mind-grower, for there are poems here which, unfolding as they do with each new reading, are going to be hard to get rid of. If I am a little uneasy it is for one unfair reason: I find myself wishing that this astounding poet would put out something big or flashy enough to turn more heads and absolutely stop all this talk about safety and propriety. The biggest surprise in the book is that dramatic monologue, and if it turns out to be a direction that Wilbur will follow, I may get my foolish wish. But what we have from him already is poetry to be very grateful for, poetry that we cannot be permitted to forget.