Tom, We've wandered off to a discussion of Wilbur, who is already being discussed on the Dickenson and Wilbur threads. There is no way for a staff member to merge all these discussions, so having edited your header, I shall respond here. For me Wilbur and Frost are poets one grows into, just as Eliot and Dylan Thomas are poets one outgrows. Last night I read cover to cover Philip Hoy's beautiful book-lenth interview with Donald Justice, who once thought Frost was pandering to the masses, but admits that he just didn't have the sophistication in 1948 to realize that Frost was the great poet of his age. When I encountered Wilbur, my comprehension of his work was dim, and I primarily appreciated his fantastic translations of the French: Villon, Jammes, de Thaun, Voltaire, Apollinaire, etc.
I am no Christian; in fact as a homosexual I have long regarded myself as in a minority oppressed by Christians. But Richard has selflessly advised this angry pagan for twenty-three years, and I have grown into his verse. Look again at the elegant similes in Fern-Beds on the adjacent thread, the tide rising through the piers, just as the ferns emerge upslope from the melting snow in his native Berkshire hills. And look also at the poems I mentioned in my answer to Roger Slater on the Dickenson thread.
If you read them as I do, you will find a reticent man, whose revelations are the more powerful for his couching them in his minute observations of the "Things of this World." In fact, the plethora of minute observations give some credence to those critics who regard him as a spectacularly accomplished lightweight. But I read deeply in Wilbur, not shallowly, and I believe that Dick is the worthiest heir to the lyric Christian tradition of George Herbert and John Donne.
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