[Tim Murphy]

Until No Word of Farewell, Sam's Selected Poems, appeared at Story Line Press, he was the ultimate stealth poet, his first trade edition being out of print, and his chapbooks hard to find. My first opportunity to read him in depth came the first day I took Wilbur sailing. He showed up at the Bight in Key West with Sam's "Area Code of God," and said, "You and Mr. Gwynn should be reading one another."

[R. S. Gwynn]

A guy who hid out in Fargo, ND, for twenty years is calling me the "ultimate stealth poet"? I say, "Ha!" I'd prefer to be known as the "ultimate inept career-manager poet."

[This message has been edited by R. S. Gwynn (edited January 30, 2003).]

[Clive Watkins]

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

[R. S. Gwynn]

I'd forgotten about that pheasant, Clive. Tim Murphy has never quoted that poem to me! Interestingly, I had purchased and read the Hall anthology before I learned of the existence of the earlier Hall, Pack, and Simpson one. I think you're right in that the selection of Wilbur poems in Hall is not as good as it could have been, though I doubt that a copyright problem was the cause. Maybe R. W. can clear this up for us.

[Anthony Lombardy]

It’s funny how vividly we remember the details of brief encounters with the people we really admire. In the summer of 1992 I managed to spot Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur seated at one of the long tables in the refectory at Sewanee. The seat next to them was briefly vacant. I ran as fast as I dared with a loaded tray of food and asked Mr. Wilbur if the chair was open to the bold, or was it reserved for the meritorious? He replied that the seat was free, and so, along with some other nearby participants in the writers’ conference, where he was visiting to give a reading, I got to talk with the Wilburs for a few minutes. I was aware that we had several mutual friends and acquaintances, including a couple of my old teachers, John Nims and Richard Eberhart, so it was easy to find topics of conversation, and although I could present myself as nothing more than a classics prof. who still harbored hopes of writing poetry, I was able to boast of having appeared once alongside Mr. Wilbur in print, since my first poem in The New Yorker had appeared alongside his splendid “Icarium Mare” in 1979. I found the Wilburs most genial and thoughtful of those around them, as I think is consistent with all reports!

Richard Wilbur was one of the few reasons to be hopeful about American poetry in the late 1970’s, when I was starting to get serious about writing, but almost everyone seemed to have forsaken meter and rhyme. I suppose, for many of us, he was an icon, of sorts, a status that may not have been entirely fair to the object of our admiration! It’s great to realize that, though time has chastised so many of my youthful enthusiasms, it has so thoroughly vindicated this one. It seems characteristically generous of Mr. Wilbur to participate in the Sphere as Tim’s distinguished guest and to comment on the fine roster of poems that Tim has lined up. Many thanks to him and a hearty welcome!

[Catherine Tufariello]

My first encounter with Richard Wilbur’s poetry came in 1983. I was nineteen, visiting my grandmother and uncle in New York, when I happened upon a volume of his poems at a Barnes & Noble in midtown. I had been writing almost exclusively metrical verse since age thirteen (to the faint embarrassment of several of my teachers), but all the contemporary poetry I read in school was free verse. Opening Mr. Wilbur’s poems at random and beginning to read, I was immediately electrified. Here were the poems I had been longing to read, beautiful, graceful poems that moved and inspired me like the great poems of the past. I remember thinking, wonderingly and with a kind of triumph, “So poets still write this way!” I would soon figure out that nobody else wrote like Richard Wilbur; nevertheless, with his work as an introduction I became aware of a revival of interest in traditional verse. My feelings of isolation receded, and his example heartened me in my early attempts to learn the craft.

I owe my opportunity to meet Mr. Wilbur and his wife, Charlee, to Tim Murphy. In the winter of 2001, after I had published a chapbook with R.L. Barth, Tim urged me to send a copy to the Wilburs, to whom he had already mentioned me. My husband Jeremy and I were then living in Miami. Tim instructed that I should, in the letter accompanying my chapbook, offer to take the Wilburs to lunch or dinner on a visit to Key West. Without Tim’s insistence that I make this overture, I would never have had the courage to do it. Soon, I received a charming note from Charlee, asking me to call them to arrange a date for the meeting. Being pregnant at the time, I couldn’t fortify myself for the call with a shot of whiskey, and I was dumbstruck when a mellifluous male voice answered. Somehow I managed to stammer out my name, and somehow everything was arranged.

On St. Patrick’s Day, 2001, Jeremy and I met the Wilburs at Louie’s, a wonderful old seafood restaurant on the water. What struck us most strongly about both of them was their charm, geniality, warm affection for one another, and utter lack of pretension. Charlee had undergone knee surgery not long before, and Dick (for so he introduced himself) was sweetly solicitous of her. For about two hours we had a wide-ranging, general conversation in which Charlee and Jeremy were fully included. We talked about poetry, but also about politics (the 2000 election still being fresh on everyone’s minds), living in Florida, their children and grandchildren, and our coming new arrival. We found ourselves telling them that we were thinking of giving the baby my surname, since I am one of four daughters and there are already several grandsons on Jeremy’s side to carry on his name. Dick and Charlee were immediately receptive to the idea and, once we had explained our reasoning, warmly approved it. They reminisced with obvious pleasure about their own early years of marriage and parenthood. Then, well into the lunch, Charlee suddenly announced that she wanted to drink to something, and told us that it was, that very day, the sixtieth anniversary of their first date, when they were both college students. Jeremy and I had the privilege not only of sharing that anniversary with them, but of hearing the story behind it. Finally, when lunch was over, Dick signed the copies of his books I had brought, and before we parted Charlee made me promise to send them a birth announcement. As soon as we returned home, I wrote down everything I could remember about the day.

Exactly four months later, our daughter Sophia was born. As promised, I sent the Wilburs an announcement and a photo. A week or two later, when Sophia was in the throes of colic, my haze of exhaustion lifted with the arrival of a neatly typed postcard. My favorite living poet pronounced the birth “wonderful news,” thought that our daughter looked “goodnatured and sapient,” and added, “I have found myself singing, ‘For she’s a jolly good fellow, For she’s a jolly good fellow, Sophia Rose Tufariello, Which nobody can deny.’” Of course it got pride of place in Sophia’s baby book. And what a story to tell her someday!

I join the chorus of voices warmly welcoming Richard Wilbur to Eratosphere. And Tim, a heartfelt thanks–-for everything.

[Jim Hayes]

Wonderful.

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

I first encountered Mr. Wilbur's work in an anthology edited by John Ciardi in 1950, titled "Mid-Century American Poets." I was in Hunter College at the time, studying poetics, reading, and already certain, by then, that poetry would occupy me for the rest of my life. That book riveted my attention: some fourteen poets are in it (my ravaged copy is still in my possession), including Shapiro, Nims, Lowell, Jarrell, Bishop and Schwartz. But the voice that called me at once and for good was that of Richard Wilbur, represented by ten early poems that all told me what I wanted to try for. Don't we all!

The essay that introduces the poems is "The Genie in the Bottle," as exciting a discovery as the poems themselves. Years later, after having read many more Wilbur poems, I came accross his "Responses: Prose Pieces 1953-1976." That, too, became holy writ, and still is.

I've had the good fortune to meet Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur on several occasions, and have found them as open and simple as we never expect the great to be. The living voice of the poet is the same as the voice of the poems, filled with the same grace, equanimity and generosity.

[Tim Murphy]

Catherine, what a story! You never told me! Here's a story Richard told on himself tonight. In January he gave a reading in Key West, and after reading many perfectly straightworward poems he read "Lying." He told the audience that when he first read it to Charlee, she said "Dick you've finally written a poem which is incomprehensible from beginning to end." When he finished reading "Lying," a man in the back of the hall, shouted "God bless your wife!"