Richard Wilbur, A Personal Reminiscence
As I have previously written, R.P. Warren once told me to seek Richard Wilbur’s counsel on my efforts to write in meter and rhyme “cause he’s the best man we’ve got.” As a teenager I was far from ready for that. I had Wilbur’s Poems, the volume that collected his early books. What I had first fallen in love with were the translations, particularly the Francis Jammes “Going to Paradise,” Philippe de Thaun’s “Pelican,” and Baudelaire’s “L’invitation au Voyage.” I was making my first, halting efforts to translate bawdy epigrams from the Greek Anthology, and it was inconceivable to me that anyone could produce such flawless poems in English which so accurately captured the great originals I could dimly comprehend with my rudimentary grasp of French.
By 1977 I was thoroughly acquainted with Wilbur and stood in awe. Here was a fellow only 30 years my senior who was bidding fair to succeed Auden as the great poet of the English language. By that time I was pretty fluent in iambic pentameter, and I sent him a sheaf of my long, rhymed, narrative poems. He promptly responded that although he made it a rule never to respond to such over-the-transom communications, he was making an exception in my case. He crisply told me what I was doing right, but added “Just because you are writing on the themes of Cavafy does not excuse you from the task of sufficiently charging your language.” I was crushed, but better, I was forced to rethink my entire poetic enterprise. We corresponded on occasion during the next two years, after which I started farming and hunting with a passion and writing in densely rhymed trimeter.
In 1994 it was time for me to crawl out from under my rock, and I wrote Wilbur again. This time the response was far more collegial: “I am surprised and delighted to see how far you have come. Everywhere I look in this manuscript I find accurate words, live rhythms.” Of course I was absolutely elated. Alan and I were soon bound for the Virgin Islands with a side trip to Key West. Upon arrival I called to ask for directions, a map of the island before me. Dick said, “You’ll note the island is a grid with one diagonal street.” I said, “Oh, you’re near the cemetary.” “Very near the cemetary, young man,” he laughed. We made an appointment for the following morning, and I proceeded to become violently ill with anticipation. Fortified by several jolts of Jack Daniels’, I found my way to Windsor Lane. Having never even seen a picture of Wilbur, and expecting this meticulous crafter of verse to be small, Alan and I were surprised to encounter a jovial and enormous fellow.
I was so naïve, so isolated, that I thought I was meeting the only competent formal poet writing in English. I managed to ask how our great art had died. He gave me copies of The Formalist, The Epigrammatist, and Tim Steele’s Missing Measures, assured me that a resurgence of verse was gaining momentum, and urged me to get in touch with Tim and begin publishing. That evening we took the Wilburs to dinner, and my first question was how had he managed to outlive and outwrite so many of his contemporaries. Charlee laughed merrily and assured us that it was solely due to his having married so well. It was apparent to both of us that these people were deeply in love, and I recited them the very early ME lyric “Alisoun,” with which they were unfamiliar. They were touched, and our friendship with that remarkable couple dates from that day.
There would be many trips to Key West, many trips to Cummington. Soon I was armed with a reading list, Robert Francis, Tim Steele, Sam Gwynn, poets I’d never heard of who deeply delighted me. But above all I was re-reading Wilbur and being influenced as I was in my youth when I had come to terms with Frost, Yeats, and Hardy. My own verse had been so bleak, and here was a poet whose understanding of the human condition was profoundly redemptive and grounded in a faith I did not share. As I read in manuscript such poems as “For C” and “Mayflies,” the great work of Wilbur’s old age, he became my favorite Christian poet since Herbert. When Suzanne Doyle, a poet as black as Murphy, read Mayflies, the book, she wrote me a note I paraphrase in the final couplet of this little poem, written in the Lake District last year:
Coniston, The Old Man
Give me today the sturdy boots
to crush this springing sod,
these florets sheathed within their shoots,
I could not walk with God.
A friend wrote of a poet who
merits his Maker’s love,
“Grace has found him in ways that you
and I are ignorant of.”
Yeats told us a man must must choose between the life and the work. Richard has succeeded spendidly in both. For his friendship, his patronage, and above all his example, I am profoundly grateful.
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