“Poetry does nothing,” Auden once wrote, but one does not have to search far in Auden's own work to find it taking controversial positions, subtly eliminating foes, and waging war against the tawdrier canons of contemporary taste. It is truer to say, as Auden himself might agree, that the poems of any man, taken as a whole, do say something about action-in-the-world. Eliot, for instance, warns us of the isolation of modern man and his need for an Incarnation, Yeats of the need to search ever deeper for adequate symbols of our condition. In their very selection of metaphor, or especially if they write a poetry of statement, all poets make a choice that implies a judgment of aesthetic if not moral value. This essay seeks to examine some of the values of Richard Wilbur, a task worth doing for two reasons. First, critical and classroom voices have faulted Wilbur, unjustly, I think, for a predilection for effect rather than depth. Secondly, the most avid reader of Wilbur, rightly engaged by his technical brilliance, may miss the judgments his poems make on the mis-en-scène he is so capable of casting in images.

Like the Romantics, Wilbur often speaks of the crises which a poet faces in order to remain faithful to his vision. Such a crisis occurs in the poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”; here, the pain of “this world” so impinges on the poet's awareness that out of the very darkness of his imagination looms the siren of escape. The poet is tempted to perceive and repeat only the beauty of this world, a consoling facsimile, but only that, of its inveterate dualism. In the poem, the escape leads to angelism: on hearing the morning wind wander through laundry on a line, the poet's soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
                                                  “Oh let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Let there, in other words, be only half a world, let there be only pure praise and joy under God's eye.

Rejecting the temptation, Wilbur goes on to take a more mature attitude toward this angelic sight.

          “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
                                                            keeping their delicate balance.”

He calls for a union of ideal and real: let even thieves and carnal lovers enjoy this clean glory. He chooses as his own the difficult stance of the nuns, a perfect image of the poet, who must maintain his balance in two words, one of surrender to unorganized living, sense-experience, and disorder, the other of an ideal search for form, contemplation, and discipline.

Other poems of Wilbur flirt with this escape to a simpler world, particularly “A World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness.” The “land of sheer horizon” in this pretentiously titled but important poem is analogous to the beauty of the laundry in “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” Both lure the poet from real objects. In this second poem he likewise rejects the lure; he warns the “beasts … of soul,” his poetic powers, to

                                                                                                    Turn, O turn
From the fine sleights of sand, from the long empty oven,
          Where flames in flamings burn
          Back to the trees arrayed
          In bursts of glare, to the halo-dialing run
Of the country creeks, and the hills' bracken tiaras made
          Gold in the sunken sun …

The sun alone, shining on the empty desert, is a traditional symbol for ideal good; but it does not suffice for the poet. His work is the synthesis of sun and more immediate objects. The trees, creeks, and hills of poetry must be present in their concreteness as well as be transformed in “bursts of glare.”

Wilbur most baldly states the need for respect for the “things of this world” in the first epigram of “Epistemology”:

Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

Here Johnson, the universalist, stubbornly applies the wrong epistemological tool to the rock-like ipseity of this world. He is a comic figure, but no more so than his adversary, the skeptic of the second epigram:

We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, “You are not true.”

The skeptic who fears to posit the reality even of a cow's teat is just as ridiculous as the man who searches only for abstract or absolute natures. For the poet, however, the skeptic is more dangerous; the “We” of the second epigram includes Wilbur himself. He again maintains his “difficult balance”; by ironically negating the two extremes of epistemology, he commits himself to respect not only the opaque reality of the sensuous given but also its symbolic possibilities. Another way of saying this, the theme of the epigrams, is that both the conceptually unintelligible concrete and its meaningful use as symbol cannot exist one without the other in poetry.

That Wilbur should affirm this truism through images is not enough, of course, to show that he is concerned with truth as well as with beauty. It is possible to look more deeply into his work to show he confirms his philosophy with poems that affirm other than aesthetic values.

“After the Last Bulletins” is a poem directly concerned with contemporary problems. Yet for poetic craft it stands second to none in the Wilbur canon. Metrically and thematically, the poem unrolls in a series of descents and ascents. The first stanza,

After the last bulletins the windows darken
And the whole city founders readily and deep
Sliding on all its pillows
To the thronged Atlantis of personal sleep

pictures man's descent and surrender of the world to night. The second stanza introduces the focal image of newspapers swept around a park by the night wind, an image that develops into a symbol of the attempt of modern conformism to wear down the sometime heroism of man.

And the wind rises. The wind rises and howls
The day's litter of news in the alleys. Trash
Tears itself on the railings,
Soars and falls with a soft crash,
Tumbles and soars again. …

In an attempt to reduce human achievement to ephemeral trivia like themselves, the newspapers “scratch the noble name” inscribed on a statue in the park. Later they “flail / Their tatters at the tired patrolman's feet,” like the snow, the poet adds, that beat at “the emperor's horses heels” when Napoleon retreated from Russia. The snow, like the newspapers, wages a war of attrition against man's perseverance in his ideal.

Pessimistically, the poet narrates the return of day:

Oh none too soon through the air white and dry
Will the clear announcer's voice
Beat like a dove, and you and I
From the heart's anarch and responsible town
Return by subway-mouth to life again,
Bearing the morning papers, …

In this parody of a regeneration ritual, modern man emerges unbaptized from his “Atlantis of personal sleep.” He is a slave at the beck and call of the media, for the radio announcer is the priest who controls his rise and fall. Man in his poverty bears for his sacred symbol only the “morning papers”; the statue in the park at least had a “noble name,” and Napoleon a stubborn dream of empire.

Only the final image of the poem conveys hope. On their way to work, the slaves of the announcer

… cross the park where saintlike men,
White and absorbed, with stick and bag remove
The litter of the night, and footsteps rouse
With confident morning sound
The songbirds in the public boughs.

These public servants are “saintlike” because they strive in their purity to remove the rubbish which would otherwise crowd man into the abyss of conformity. They are the redeemers in Wilbur's world, and like a Greek chorus witnessing their holy quest, the songbirds rejoice in “confident morning sound.”

A study might profitably be made solely concerned with Wilbur's use of images from the communications media, which he sees as hostile to man. Certainly the major portion of “After the Last Bulletins” demonstrates his encounter with them. His mechanical commuters, so many wind-up toys, show his concern for freedom-bereft modern man whose choices and ideas are too often reduced to those provided by Big Brother through the media. Yet hope remains, for rising out of this spectacle are the modern saints who strive to keep man free. On an unheroic level, they redeem an otherwise hopeless situation. “After the Last Bulletins” celebrates, with reservation, the frail but indomitable perseverance of the human spirit.

In another poem, “Year's End,” Wilbur acknowledges this perseverance within himself. The action of the poem shows him fighting against time as the New Year begins. Like “After the Last Bulletins,” “Year's End” opens on a descent into death:

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow …

Falling snow, a sign of the falling year and all its unfinished commitments, naturally leads to the image of leaves falling and being frozen in a lake. Caught in their wind-blown attitudes, they are “their own most perfect monument.” Likewise, the ferns and mammoths fossilized a million years ago achieve a “perfection in death.” Amidst these skillful imagistic transitions, Wilbur plays with the idea that stillness and inactivity, the familiar “still-point,” are the perfect sublunar condition. Face to face with them, he contemplates what they suggest: the transience of life and the relentless roll of time.

Fossils lead, in this logic of images, to remembrance of the human figures frozen in ash at Pompeii, but here the poem turns.

                                                                                                    And at Pompeii
The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

It is impossible to contemplate this disaster with the peace reserved for falling snow and fossils. For the victims of the volcano are “incomplete”; they have been caught and killed without achieving themselves through action. They are like the commuters of “After the Last Bulletins,” only more pathetic. Snatched from a life that was but non-life, they will no longer have a chance to free themselves in the accomplishment of that “shapely thing.”

Wilbur then draws a lesson:

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

The perfect syntax of this last stanza shows Wilbur at his best. The one-sentence first line does what it suggests: it pauses. The short sentences which follow beat out the staccato struggle between time the destroyer and time the medium of meaningful human action. “More time, more time,” pleads the poet, but these final lines let the world continue on its harsh course, leaving his plea to echo in its own futility.

So the world continues, and with it, the opportunity for action. But will the men of the New Year heed the lesson of Pompeii and quiet their obsession with trivia? Wilbur gives no assurance that they will. They greet the New Year not with the poet's hesitation, but with insensitively conformist “barrages of applause.” In “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” Wilbur blesses the world precisely as dualistic; he presents his credentials as a realistic observer. In “After the Last Bulletins,” he explores its erosion of complacent humanity, but still hopes for a redemption by modern saints. In “Year's End,” he loses hope: one man struggling against time is not enough. The poem mirrors the oft-felt chasm between the enormous potentiality of modern man and the paltry events which actually occupy him.

In tracing this variation of moods in some poems of Richard Wilbur I have shown that he is indeed more than a cub reporter willy-nilly blessing his cosmos in intricate verse forms. One more problem, however, remains to be solved. Does the very variation of his moods exclude a consistent point-of-view which we frankly ask of our professional poets? I think not. Wilbur is more aware than the common man that the modern world, like the park in “After the Last Bulletins,” is riddled with cant. Conformist abstraction subliminally breaks in upon us, especially from the “buried radio” of the media. Our perception driven down stereotyped gullies of reaction, we are told how and when to think. It is precisely against this loss of contact with the true sights and sounds of this world that Wilbur wages poetic war. Angelism, abstractionism, skepticism, Big Brother, and meaningless activity are all potential parts of this loss, and Wilbur rejects them all. The humor and suavity with which he does this should not distract from his essential seriousness. On the other hand, if he only rarely succumbs to contemporary angoisse, is it not because he understands that this too can become a form of blinding propaganda?

Positively, Wilbur chooses scrupulously to attend to the variety of moods and colors the world affords. Both the pessimism of “Year's End” and the mature joy of “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” both found in experience, enter into his poems, as well as numerous pairs of other conflicting attitudes. His basic point-of-view is, therefore, simply an intensified awareness of the world itself. Perhaps this is not philosophical enough for some readers; Wilbur is indeed only a part-time philosopher. In most of his poems he concentrates not on the creative process itself, which so fascinated the Romantics, but on the poetic perception, the outside of the imagination. This he wishes to restore, always in careful form, to its integrity. In his poems we are blessed with true images of the world in which we live, serious warnings that for all our philosophies, we may not know what moods and colors it affords for him who honestly believes in it.