In a career spanning more than sixty years, Richard Wilbur has devoted himself to organising the daylight and exploring the darkness. A musical, formal and cultured poet, his latest Collected is a continuing triumph. At 85 he has outlived most of his peers. Yet he is still producing those elegantly constructed, metrical investigations into our lives. Wilbur was brought up on the Metaphysical Poets and, through this long career, has deployed their love of conceits, verbal surprises and immediacy. For Wilbur, as for them, the object has been to express honestly a sense of the complexities of the world. His diction has been accessible, his imagery drawn from the commonplace and from a variety of other sources...
...If there has been a limit to Richard Wilbur's fame - at least in England - it is partly due to the availability of his work over the earlier years and partly, perhaps, to the fact that he is self-effacing. He is not alone in this, of course (the wonderful Donald Justice springs to mind, as well as Anthony Hecht and Elizabeth Bishop). Nevertheless it may go some way to explain why, unlike other brilliant and more self-revealing peers such as Lowell and Berryman, Wilbur has not always been fashionable. Also, the man who once wrote, 'The poem is a conflict with disorder, not a message from one person to another' has clearly not courted popularity. Hence James Wood, reviewing the Faber New and Collected Poems (1987), argued that 'Wilbur as a poetic self, a persona, does not exist' and felt, consequently, that 'With Wilbur, there is a civil blank. It is not, finally, enough.' This may not have been an uncommon judgement and even one the poet might have expected, but it is not fair.
In Collected Poems 1943-2004 there are too many riches not to acknowledge - as prize after prize has done - that Richard Wilbur is a poet of rare talent. He is an important American poet, and The Waywiser Press has done a great good in producing what must substantially be a life's work. At £14.99 it would be a hard reader who did not feel more than amply rewarded.
Tony Roberts |
