His poems are quite traditional, which I very much appreciate. ( )

I gave an earlier collection of Wilbur to a friend because I knew one of his favorites, “In the Elegy Season,” was in it. That poem begins “Haze, char, and the weather of All Souls’: / A giant absence mopes upon the trees,” and contains a customary Wilbur move from the season of the poet’s subject to another season, or, as in this case, two: “And now the envious mind / Which could not hold the summer in my head” begins to think about spring. Admittedly, Keats does it, too, in “To Autumn.” Another place in Wilbur we can see it is “Fall in Corrales,” which begins “Winter will be feasts and fires in the shut houses,” and also looks back at summer and at spring, “when in bald April the wind / Unhoused the spirit for a while.”
Soon after that I ordered this book, whose subtitle years caught me: Wilbur’s poetic career exactly corresponding with my own life, at least up to that point (“Not yet,” the farmer responds when the city slicker asks him, “Have you lived here all your life?”). And there are many gems among the poems I had never read, as well as a new delight in the ones I had. Wilbur’s word choices and images make me want to write about the poem I’m reading, as a way of exploring it. I began reading through the book in May of 2005 and I began writing these notes in May of 2006, when I had almost finished reading all the poems at least once.
He has many poems about the difference between the abstract, intellectual realm versus the here-and-now. It’s seen as a male/female difference in “La Rose des Vents,” a dialogue between the poet and a lady, where he argues that because the shore’s shape is constantly changing, we should “dwell / On the rose of the winds, / Which is the isle / Of every sea.” She answers, somewhat disdainfully, that “There are some shores / Still left to find / Whose broken rocks / Will last the hour” and conjures him to “Forsake those roses / Of the mind / And tend the true, / The mortal flower.” “A World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness” is a better-known example of this duality, this time imaged as between the speaker’s “camels of the spirit . . who long . . . to drink / Of pure mirage” and a part of him he urges to turn back to trees and “country creeks” and, in an image that draws from the Christmas story but also gives it a positivist spin, “the supernova burgeoning over the barn,” the “light incarnate” which is the “spirit’s right / Oasis.” My favorite is “A Fire-Truck,” in which the passage of a fire truck, siren going, “Right down the shocked street,” drives out of the speaker’s mind everything he was thinking except “Thought is degraded action!”
Wilbur writes frequently about nature, but it is nature as it meets the human. In “A Barred Owl” he says we tell the “wakened child” that the bird it heard says “who cooks for you?” as a means of keeping it from thinking about
the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of a small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.
He dissects the difference between nature’s motion and rest in “A Grasshopper” and describes “The Death of a Toad,” and “Driftwood.” He marvels at “Four great rock maples seemingly aligned” in “In Trackless Woods” before going on to see “amazing patterns” in nature that are “Not subject ot our stiff geometries.” In “A Wood” he goes under the oaks to look at the understory trees of dogwood and witch hazel.
He writes about stars and constellations often, for example in “In the Field” and “Under Cygnus.”
Daniel Mark Epstein, reviewing the present collection in The New Criterion when it came out in 2005, notes that Wilbur was a cryptographer in World War II, and calls Wilbur the greatest metaphysical poet since WWII, just as Stevens was the greatest on of the first half of the twentieth century. He says critics have complained that Wilbur is not confessional enough “In the operatic vein of Sylvia Plath” or enough of a formal innovator. He thinks the poetry can be “subtle and cryptic,” and, in the case of “Advice to a Prophet,” can “teeter on the far edge of the comprehensible” because Wilbur “tackles difficult subjects and is never contented with an easy answer.”
Wilbur’s “fundamental approach” is a “combination of quietism, and a homegrown gnosticism” that he found in Poe. He summarizes the gnostic myth in Poe thus:
The universe, as Poe conceived it, is a poetic or artistic creation, a “plot of God.” It has come about through God’s breaking up of His original unity. . . . God, in creating the universe, fragmented Himself into His creatures . . . it is they who must . . . restore the original oneness of things . . . . And since the creation is a work of art, the counterimpulse that can reunify it must be imaginative.
Epstein says “ the structure of dozens of Wilbur’s finest poems reflect [sic] the ‘counterimpulse’ to restore the oneness of things,” and he uses as an example “The Terrace,” set at a meal high on a mountainside, where the green tablecloth becomes the fields and everything around in the view becomes one with the meal. Epstein thinks “In the Field” is “perhaps Wilbur’s greatest” landscape poem. The poet and his lover walk at night in the fields to look at constellations, which the poet remembers have shifted since the Egyptians and other ancients noted them. The thought is unsettling and the lovers go in. during the day they find “Those holes in heaven have been sealed” and there are “galaxies / Of flowers.” Epstein says “Many a fine poet would be satisfied with that,” but Wilbur “waits for a better answer.” It is “the heart’s wish for life” which “pounds beyond the sun” and is “the one / Unbounded thing we know.”
I read the collection as it is presented, with new poems first, working toward the earliest ones, and so had a strange view of Wilbur’s development. Epstein says grace and providence play more of a role in later poems, Wilbur’s family—wife and daughter and granddaughter—show up more. Wilbur “makes more sense” than Hart Crane or Stevens, to whom he may have “small debts,” as to Marianne Moore, Frost, John Crowe Ransom. Consistently, though, from the beginning, the voice at the center of the poems is “generous, curious, fair-minded, and passionate.” ( )

His personal poems are wonderful. The more literary poems less accessible without the requisite study. ( )

Local Author (Cummington, MA)