SOURCE: Southworth, James G. “The Poetry of Richard Wilbur.” College English 22, no. 1 (October 1960): 24-9.

Richard Wilbur, born in 1921, is one of the youngest American poets whose work challenges attention and whose accomplishment merits careful appraisal. He is now at a critical point in his career. An able craftsman, working in the great tradition of English poetry, he has utilized the results of the older modern poets who were consciously experimental in their techniques. He represents, one might say, a new conservatism. He is not a prolific poet, nor is he ever a careless, slipshod versifier, although some poems may be said to lack any genuine significance beyond that of technical competence. Although his subject-matter is in the humanistic tradition, his contribution to date lies essentially in his craftsmanship. This being the case, let us examine his craftsmanship first, reserving a discussion of his more controversial characteristics—a limited humanistic vision—to the last. A few figures will be necessary.

In the volume Poems 1943-1956 Wilbur has employed at least 66 different stanza forms, ranging from 2 to 16 verses. Although it is apparent that he makes most frequent use of the 4-verse stanza and 6-verse stanza (30 and 17 respectively), a mere numerical figure gives little idea of the variety within these patterns. Nor does the fact that he employs 5 different rhyme schemes for the 4-line stanza contribute much more. One can go even farther and say that the reader will learn little more if he superficially scans the poems in this stanza metrically. He will find that only three have the appearance of being in the a⁵-b⁵-a⁵-b⁵ pattern and that he employs only once each of the remaining 9—a³-b⁵-a⁶-b⁵, a³-b⁵-a⁶-b³, etc. An understanding of Wilbur's subtlety can only come from a detailed analysis of the rhythms of each poem. What he has done is to bring an essentially rhythmical prosody within the limits of a metrical one. I think that the sensitive reader concerned with bringing out the rhetorical meaning of the poem would think of the poems as essentially rhythmical rather than metrical. Seventeen of the poems cannot, in fact, be read other than as rhythmical; 54 can be read as metrical if the rhetorical sense is strictly subordinated, and 6 can be read either as metrical or rhythmical. Examples of the last are “Objects,” “The Death of the Toad,” “Flumen Tenebarum,” and “Giacometti.” Even in those poems which are strictly metrical, the rhetorical sense counterpoints the basic pattern.¹ Wilbur has, therefore, performed a great service in fusing the best elements of both traditions in his work and has restored to metrical poetry the subtlety that was being squeezed out of it as the iambic foot gained the dominance. Gascoigne had complained of this growing dominance in the sixteenth century and Dryden in the seventeenth, but it was not until the latter part of the nineteenth that this foot put a stranglehold on poetry, particularly American poetry.

Even more interesting is the freer, more rhythmical effect Wilbur achieves in an essentially metrical pattern by his use of the caesura and the manner in which he links his stanzas together. Instead of making each stanza complete, he groups them: 1—2, 4—5 (“The Giaour and the Pacha”), 1—2—3—4; 5—6—7—8 (“Objects”), 1—2—3; 4—5—6 (“Still, Citizen Sparrow”), 1—2; 3—4; 5—6; 9—10 (“driftwood”), and others.

Wilbur has an eye trained for concrete detail, whether it is focused on a potato (“Potato”), snow (“First Snow in Alsace”—reminiscent of Milton's “to hide her guilty front with innocent snow”), trees (“Poplar, Sycamore”), a restaurant after rain (“Part of a Letter”), a courtyard (“A Courtyard Thaw”), or newspapers tossed and battered by the wind (“After the Last Bulletins”). This observation of detail is likewise characteristic of his images. The noises of evening are “rich as a running down record,” the “wind went tamely and samely as puppies, tousling the Japanese maples,” the grey hills are “quilled with birches,” the poplar is “wind-wed and faithless to wind, troweling air tinily.”

The sea and things connected with the sea likewise play an important role in his thought as well as in his imagery—the “bells will chant … clear as the waves are heard / Crashing at Mount Desert.” The first stanza of “Conjuration” well illustrates his grasp of detail:

Backtrack of sea, the baywater goes; flats
Bubble in sunlight, running with her-
          ringbone streams;
Sea-lettuce lies in oily mats
On sand mislaid; stranded
Are slug, stone, and shell, as dreams
Drain into morning shine, and the cheat
                    is ended.

So, too, does the first stanza of “Part of a Letter”:

Easy as cove-water rustles its pebbles and shells
In the slosh, spread, seethe, and the backsliding
Wallop and tuck of the wave, and just that cheerful,
Tables and earth were riding. …

He conveys the intense coldness of the water when he speaks of the “gunmetal bay” (“Castles and Distances”), and captures the advent of twilight which “glides like a giant bass.” In “Beacon,” too, he communicates with passion and economy:

Founded on rock and facing the night-fouled sea
A beacon blinks at its own brilliance,
Over and over with cutlass gaze
Solving the Gordian waters.

It is obvious that he has lived close to nature along the Eastern seaboard and that he has looked upon it with devotion and a fresh imagination.

Wilbur generally uses the device of alliteration well, making it subtly visible everywhere but outstandingly so in the final stanza of “Bell Speech” with its insistent alliteration on d, although he makes an unfortunate use of it in a pun in “The Peace of Cities”—“Luftwaffe waft what. …” Assonance also occurs frequently, but blatantly so in “Grace”—“but this … is habitude, if not pure hebetude.” His vocabulary is accurate with occasional use of the unusual word—“stasis,” “Bavardage,” “Periploi,” “paludal,” “crepitant,” “noyade,” “carageen,” “reticulum,” and others.

The important thing, however, is his acute sense that rhythm—the inner harmony of the line—is more important than the easier device of rhyme. The already quoted first stanza of “Conjuration” illustrates this generalization. The two short vowels of “backtrack” in “backtrack of sea” convey a sense of reversal and a delayed movement which gains impetus in the five different vowel sounds of “the baywater goes.” The final short a of “flats” repeats the initial short a and gives a slight pause where no rhetorical one exists. The three short u's in line two with the alliteration on b in lines one and two, the four nasals and the three liquids repeat the movement of line one—a pause, then movement. Once the tide has gone out, the verse becomes static. The interweaving alliteration on l and s and the subtle use of m and n come to a fall at “mislaid”—“Sea-lettuce lies on oily mats / On sand mislaid”—an initial trochee and five iambi. A further detail begins with the final word “stranded,” a trochee, and the rhythm of lines five and six reveal a subtle variation.

Wilbur reveals his craftsmanship in the subtle manner in which he combines the forementioned technical devices into a closely integrated poem where thought and expression are one. The reader feels with the first two readings that he is in the presence of a poet capable of achieving the density of expression that is the requisite of good poetry. One can detect the influence of older poets—Hopkins, Frost, Marianne Moore, Stevens, Williams, and even that of some of the older Victorians—but Wilbur is never a slavish imitator. In concreteness of language and elegiac tone he often reminds one of Keats. In many instances, however, a third reading reveals certain basic weaknesses in many of the poems. Since it is not the fault of the technique, can it be a short-sightedness of vision? The fault of youth? Of complacency? It is important, therefore, that we examine the subject matter of the poems.

Wilbur has said (Twentieth Century Authors, First Supp., ed. Stanley Kunitz, 1955, p. 1080) that “one does not use poetry for its main purposes, as a means of organizing oneself and the world until one's world somehow gets out of hand,” and he adds that “a general cataclysm is not required; the disorder must be personal and may be wholly so, but poetry, to be vital, does seem to need a periodic acquaintance with the threat of chaos.” Many of the poems are concerned with just such problems. The song of the cicada, he says, for example, “springs healing questions into binding air” (“Cicadas”). Generalized, this means that an aesthetic experience brings release to whoever has experienced an intense aesthetic reaction of any depth or magnitude. He is knowingly never afterward quite the same person.

The great religions stress the importance of spiritual growth—of becoming. Wilbur recognizes that all of man's experiences (that is, real experiences and not merely sensations) are a part of this becoming—a state, however, which cannot be forced, and must necessarily work in the subconscious (“Water Walker”). He expresses the same idea tangentially by pointing out that the end of an action is often not equal to the action leading to the end—that the struggle is the important aspect (“The Giaour and the Pacha”). A touch of Zen Buddhism colors his belief in the interrelationship of all things—“the liberty of any thing becomes / the liberty of all” (“In a Bird Sanctuary”), an idea more poetically developed in “Conjuration.”

To achieve the desired state, however, demands a constantly refreshed and alert vision, a “wrenching things awry.” This disturbs the poet; although it is a common experience:

Does sense so stale that it must need derange
The will to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?

(“Praise in Summer”)

We know, for example, that a painting tends to become merely a part of the wall unless we remove it for a time or hang it in a different place. And to see our surroundings with a poet's freshness we must remove ourselves from them in order to renew our vision. Wilbur escapes from his dulled senses by means of a powerful imagination brought to bear on common objects. This activity sets him “fearfully free.”

Since the use and power of imagination motivate at least ten poems—“Objects,” “A Dutch Courtyard,” “My Father Paints the Summer,” “L'Étoile,” “In the Elegy Season,” “Clearness,” “Ceremony,” “Lamarck Elaborated,” and “Digging for China,”—it is important to see what he says about imagination. The reader frequently recalls Keats's and Auden's treatment of the subject. More akin to Keats's of “To Autumn” than “Ode to a Nightingale,” the poet stresses the necessity of having “objects speak.” “Guard and gild what's common,” he says, and forget “uses and prices and names.” His model is Pieter de Hooch (“Objects,” “A Dutch Courtyard”). Or, as he says elsewhere, “Caught Summer is always an imagined time” (“My Father Paints the Summer”). In the autumn, his imagination not only holds summer in his head but carries him past the winter's cold to the burgeoning spring (“In the Elegy Season”). Imagination, then, when employed on the concrete object is good; but it is dangerous, he says in “A World without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness,” when the artist drinks of the “pure mirage.” He repeats this idea in “Clearness.” He also expresses the necessity for a closeness to the concrete in a slightly oblique way when mentioning “how much we are the words we wander in” (“Ceremony”)—a poetical way of saying that things have significance only as we give them significance. The converse of this attitude toward the concrete is his elaboration of Lamarck's statement that “the environment creates the organ.”

Imagination as a subject occurs less frequently in Wilbur's later poems. We find it in his depiction of the power of imagination in a child (“Digging for China”); in “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” and in a plea to give imagination free rein:

Why should it be more shy
Than chimney-nesting storks, or sparrows on a wall?
          Oh, let it climb wherever it can cling
          Like some great trumpet-vine, a natural thing
          To which all birds that fly
                                                                                                    come natural.
          Come, stranger, sister, dove:
          Put on the reins of love.

(“All These Birds”)

Love as a subject occurs less frequently in Wilbur's poems than it does in the work of most young poets, but when he does approach the subject as in “June Light,” “A Simile for your Smile,” and “Apology” he does so with delicacy and reserve, almost with shyness. Occasionally he takes a satirical tone toward the subject (“Love of the Puppets”), but beneath his light verse lies an undertone of seriousness.

Wilbur is thoroughly mature in his attitude that one need never regret the past but should rectify it by his present actions (“The Pardon”). He is aware, too, that the better to understand those responsibilities of which he must never lose sight the more necessary is it that he escape from his surroundings in order to have a sharper perspective. But he should shun the comfort of the recluse (“Castles and Distances”), and he must be aware that life cannot be left to chance, but calls for direction (“Parable,” “The Good Servant”). He echoes Frost in the idea that we only see the future whole when it has become the past—“We fray into the future, rarely wrought / Save in the tapestries of afterthought” (“Year's End”). In a poem of fine observation (“The Terrace”) he repeats the truism that we get from anything only what we take to it; he raises the question of the restless energy that sometimes makes a man dissatisfied with perfection; he is fully aware that the sometimes crooked politician is of more worth to society than “citizen sparrow” who does little; he realizes the necessity for making life significant; and he finds the mind superior to the bat in “that in the very happiest intellection / A graceful error may correct the curve.”

Unfortunately, however, too many poems do not say so much. Wilbur fills poem after poem with excellent descriptive details or presents a vivid vignette but he does not lead the poem to a satisfactory resolution. It is in the later poems, too, that one senses the lack. Wilbur realizes, it is true, that with age, vision and imagination grow weaker (“Merlin Enthralled”) and it may be that he senses the change in himself. But vision returns momentarily, at least, and then, he says,

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.

(“An Event”)

Several poems, too, lose some of their first appeal when reread. “Beowulf” and “Clearness” are two such for me. The tone and imagery are excellent, but I feel the need of something more than expertise.

Wilbur's statement about the use of poetry comes frequently to my mind. Does the failure of many poems to make a strong impact arise from the fact that he has failed to have the “periodic acquaintance with the threat of chaos”? Has he subsided into too equable a life? Despite the fact that each poem is craftsmanlike and free of the technical defects that make so much of the work of a versifier like Viereck or of a poet like Ciardi downright shoddy and trivial, the reader is left disappointed. He has shared the poet's delight in the fleeting moments of aesthetic delight such as that of the vignette of the girl in “Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning” and elsewhere. The whole significance lies in his capture of that moment, but, to me at least, it is not enough.

Wilbur is a deft translator, capturing the wit and grace of his original. The release from having to furnish both the subject and the technique enables him to concentrate on the technical aspects of his task and he succeeds admirably. His translation of Molière, for example, is witty, fluid, and urbane. Unwillingly I am reminded of Ezra Pound, who was only at his best when he had the thought from another, such as Propertius, and needed only to furnish the technique. It is possible, of course, that Wilbur is at the critical point of his career. His promise and achievement have been such that it will be a great loss to literature if he is not able to invest his interpretation of his experiences with greater significance. It is just possible that he needs to recognize that the “threat of chaos” is already upon him, albeit a threat the nature of which he has not hitherto experienced, the dual threat of Chaos and Old Night.

Note

1. I have elsewhere expressed my dislike of the word “counterpoint” because of its inaccuracy. A musical notation is necessary to capture the sensitivity of Wilbur's rhythms.