Chris,
There is another later assessment of Wilbur by Jarrell in his "Fifty Years of American Poetry" (1963), which can be found in Brad Leithauser's recently edited volume of Jarrell's prose <u>No Other Book; Selected Essays</u> (1999). Like the 1950 excerpt reproduced in Dave Mason's essay, it tepidly praises:
"Petronius spoke of the 'studied felicity' of Horace’s poetry, and I can never read one of Richard Wilbur's books without thinking of this phrase. His impersonal, exactly accomplished, faintly sententious skill produces poems that, ordinarily, compose themselves into a little too regular a beauty--there is no eminent beauty without a certain strangeness in the proportion; and yet 'A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra' is one of the most marvelously beautiful, one of thee most nerarly perfect poesm any American has written...." p. 252-252.
There is another jab, much more nasty, leveled at "a larger group of poets who, so to speak, come out of Richard Wilbur's overcoat. The work of these academic, tea-party, creative-writing class poets rather tamely satisfies the standards of technique implicit in what they consider the 'best modern practice'..."
And all this comes from an essay in which Jarrell takes swipes at Pound, Moore, Williams, Stevens, Crane, etc., so it gets a little confusing.
I kind of wonder if working Wilbur against the derision of “masochistic modernists” gets one very far in the long run. It seems like you're hitting pay-dirt already in the piece you posted on Tim's thread, and without the usual static and noise. You're offering substantive, original reasons why Wilbur is a great poet and why we should read him. I would be very interested to see what, if anything, someone like Richard Howard writes about Wilbur. Howard strikes me as a poet-critic who can step deftly across modernism and formalism and combine the two, which is what I think Wilbur actually does .
Good Luck,
John
edited: Chris, you're hitting "pay-dirt", not "bedrock." Sorry.
[This message has been edited by J.A. Crider (edited February 23, 2005).]
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