Very well put, Walter. I, too, like two of his poems, but not those two.
Here is my early morning comment on social media, in case anyone (...horrors!) missed it:
A roadblock made me have to drive into and through a neighborhood of North Caldwell this morning. A bastion of Sopranos mansions with only a holdover sense of the colonial era stone estates and farms that Richard Wilbur knew growing up there. I noticed his obituary in the Times when I got to the train station in Little Falls. I always walked past his poetry as I would some huge historical painting by Jacques Louis David at the Met with a nod to its classical beauty and faultless execution, on my way to Rembrandt, Titian, or Pissarro. But Wilbur was also a man out of time, and one has to respect him for that.
RM
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