Perhaps the experience of one English reader of Wilbur may be of interest.
I first came across the poetry of Richard Wilbur in the winter of 1962 in Donald Hall’s eclectic and fascinating Penguin anthology Contemporary American Poetry. Hall included eight poems: "Tywater", "‘A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness’", Museum Piece", "After the Last Bulletins", "She", "The Undead", "In the Smoking Car" and "Shame". I confess that no poem in this group made a great impression on me at the time. I found other poems and other poets much more stimulating - Lowell and Berryman, (whom I knew already), Nemerov, Justice, Snyder, Levertov (mainly because of her lovely poem about the county of Essex, her birthplace) and Mezey. The two who made the most powerful, indeed the most lasting, impression were Anthony Hecht and James Wright, though of Wright’s work only his 1963 collection, The Branch Will Not Break, has continued to sustain my interest. (Among volumes of American verse published in my lifetime - since 1945 - and which I happen to have come across, this remains on my list of favourites.) As to Wilbur, hindsight suggests that a much more enticing selection of his work up to 1963 could have been made. So it was that, at first, he passed me by.
Some years later, I began coming across Wilbur’s poems in standard school anthologies. Those which turned up most often were "Digging for China", "The Pardon", "The Death of a Toad" and "First Snow in Alsace. Then, in 1975, in the library of the school where I worked, I found a copy of the Meridian Books anthology, New Poets of England and America, edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack and Louis Simpson. This, which had first appeared in the States in 1957 and had been reprinted four times up to 1960, the date of the school copy, preceded Hall’s Penguin volume by six years. When I discovered that the librarian had tossed the book out because its spine was irreparably split, I retrieved it from the bin - and have it to this day.
The anthology was interesting in that, under the slogan "Maturity No Object", it gathered in alphabetical order of surnames fifty-two British and American poets, representing each being with a generous number of poems. In bringing together such writers as Charles Causley, Donald Davie, W. S. Graham, Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill and Philip Larkin (from the UK) and Edgar Bowers, Henri Coulette, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, Donald Justice, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Robert Mezey, Howard Nemerov and Adrienne Rich (from the USA), it created a wider context in which Wilbur’s thirteen poems could be placed. No doubt for copyright reasons, none of Wilbur’s thirteen appeared in Hall’s later UK anthology. I was both pleased to have made this find and frustrated because I realized that, had I come across the two anthologies in the order in which they had been published, my initial view of Wilbur might have been very different.
I rehearse this history to illustrate the influence chance often has on our reading and, for those of use who aspire to be writers, perhaps upon our writing as well.
What would I have learned from Wilbur had I had better access to him in my teens and twenties (the period I have been describing)? They are, of course, the lessons all of us who have admired his virtues have sought to learn - his metrical brilliance, for instance, and, more profoundly, his joyful and serious wit (in this context, these are not contradictory adjectives); but I would single out, too, his expressive management of the dynamics of the English sentence.
In 1971, Faber published an English edition of Walking to Sleep. Very soon, this joined my private list of favourite single volumes of post-War American verse, a diverse gathering, which, apart from Wright’s book, includes Conrad Aiken’s The Morning Song of Lord Zero, Anthony Hecht’s The Hard Hours and Millions of Strange Shadows, Galway Kinnell’s The Past, Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead, Jim Powell’s It Was Fever That Made the World and Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems (a "cheat", this, inasmuch as all but the last two sections date from before 1945).
There are so many fine poems in Walking to Sleep - exemplary in form and style and, in various way, moving - that it is hard to make a selection. Those that have endured with particular clarity include "Seed Leaves", "Fern-Beds in Hampshire County", "A Miltonic Sonnet for Mr. Johnson etc." and "A Late Aubade". I have presented all of these to Advanced level students in the past; all struck an appropriate chord. As a head teacher, I used from time to time to read "A Wood" to school assemblies, a morning gathering of up to eight hundred pupils. Its "message" - that "no one style…is recommended" - seemed to have particular resonance in that context.
Forced to pick one poem, however, I should, after bridling, pick three, the three poems in the set entitled "Running". I love the beautifully managed development of the whole series, but especially the way Wilbur plays with images of discontinuity and progression in the third poem, "Dodwell’s Road": the jogger who slows "to a swagger" at the crown of the road, the "Loud burden of streams at run-off" sounding in his ears, the "sun’s rocket frazzled in blown tree heads", but who nonetheless asserts that he is still "part of that great going", adding, however, that he strolls now and is "watchful". In an echo, perhaps, of that famous passage from Lucretius - "Inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla animantum / et quasi cursores vitaï lampada tradunt" ("and in a short space the generations of living creatures change, and, like runners, pass on the torch of life") - the poem ends thus:
You, whoever you are,
If you want to walk with me you must step lively.
I run, too, when the mood offers,
Though the god of that has left me.
But why in the hell spoil it?
I make a clean gift of my young running
To the two boys who break into view,
Hurdling the rocks and racing,
Their dog dodging before them
This way and that, his yaps flushing a pheasant
Who lifts now from the blustery grass
Flying full tilt already.
Since then, of course, we have had The Mind-Reader, New Poems (1987), a Collected and now Mayflies - a "clean gift" and a challenge to us all.
Clive Watkins
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