[Richard Wakefield]

Here's Randall Jarrell on Richard Wilbur, about the time of Wilbur's second book. The essay is far more laudatory than this excerpt suggests, but I'd like to hear what folks make of it.

"Most of his poetry consents too easily to its own unnecessary limitations. An unusually reflective half-back told me that as a run develops there is sometimes a moment when you can 'settle for six or eight yards, or else take a chance and get stopped cold or, if you're lucky, go the whole way.' Mr. Wilbur almost always settles for six or eight yards; and so many reviewers have praised him for this that in his second book he takes fewer risks than in his first. (He is like one of those Southern girls to whom everybody north of Baltimore has said, 'Whatever you do, don't lose that lovely Southern accent of yours'; after a few years they sound like Amos and Andy.) If I were those reviewers I would quote to Mr. Wilbur something queer and true that Blake said on the same subject:'You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.' Mr. Wilbur never goes too far, but he never goes far enough. In the most serious sense of the word he is not a satisfactory poet. And yet he seems the best of the quite young poets writing in this country, poets considerably younger than Lowell and Bishop and Shapiro and Roethke and Schwartz; I want to finish by admiring his best poems, not by complaining about their limitations. But I can't blame his readers if they say to him in encouraging impatient voices: 'Come on, take a chance!' If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity -- every writer has to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself."

[Christopher Mulrooney]

I criticized Wilbur's Molières when Brian Bedford was packing Broadway houses in them. I can't imagine a more terrible and daunting task than translating Molière, and I had no idea Jarrell was such a wit, as officers of the L.A.P.D. are wont to describe a "witness".

[This message has been edited by Christopher Mulrooney (edited February 01, 2001).]

[Tim Murphy]

I think RJ was wrong, and these days most people would agree with me. Bruce Bauer refutes him in his Wilbur essay in his book, Prophets and Professors (is that right?) There is some justice in RJ's critique: a young poet should be aware of his limitations. Richard was 29; nonetheless the second book includes The Pardon, a goal post to goal post runback, and a poem that foreshadows the great Wilbur of the 1980s and 90s.

I disagree with Christopher about the Molieres. Dana Gioia, one of the best poet-translators of my generation, told me Dick should assemble all his translations in one immense volume, and title it "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair." Richard has made Moliere and Racine sell-out staples of the English-speaking stage, thereby performing a huge service to French literature and making himself a very wealthy man in the process.

[Richard Wakefield]

I too like Wilbur's Moliere very much, although I have read no other Moliere translations and don't read French and so can make no direct comparisons.
The excerpt from Jarrell interests me because it is an example of a critic so caught up in the current that he mistakes it for the enduring. I suspect that the chance he wanted Wilbur to take was to write free verse or, at least, much freer verse. Yet departures from form were so much the expected thing that sticking to form became the more risky choice. Although I have no complaint against the poets Jarrell holds up -- Bishop and Roethke, especially -- I don't turn to them nearly as often as to Wilbur, and I'm probably far from alone in that preference.

[Alan Sullivan]

That's a good riposte to Jarrell on the subject of "risk."

I would like to make one other observation. We have the advantage over Jarrell because we can look at a much larger body of Wilbur's work now and see how he has evolved during a long career.

I think Jarrell may have rightly discerned the start of a trend in Wilbur's verse toward more direct expression, and away from the baroque formulations of a youth playing with language. Would this shift have displeased Jarrell? What does the rest of his essay suggest? Does he praise the traits Wilbur was starting to outgrow?

Alan Sullivan

[Kate Benedict]

If Jarrell was reviewing Ceremony, RW's second book, perhaps he was reacting to a certain distance or coolness in the poems therein. Indeed, a reader will not find much to "relate" to, experientially. The bulk of the poems are cerebral or witty; they seem to be written by a man amputated from the cheekbones down. But RW, even then, had more to offer in that disembodied state than most poets ever have or ever will. A reader takes pleasure, even finds excitement, in that very wit, and in the deft craft.

Snide, subversive, this is my favorite part of the Jarrell quote:

(He is like one of those Southern girls to whom everybody north of Baltimore has said, 'Whatever you do, don't lose that lovely Southern accent of yours'; after a few years they sound like Amos and Andy.)

It's a criticism that can be directed at so many poets writing today, writing in any day. They find their "voice," or think they do, and they become captives of it; in the worst cases, they become parodists of it.

[This message has been edited by Kate Benedict (edited February 02, 2001).]

[Richard Wakefield]

Alan, I don't know Wilbur's poetry book by book, so I'd have to go back and try to reconstruct whatever Jarrell was reacting to. I came upon him all of a piece, the way my children did with the Beatles. Kate, your take on it sounds good to me, and of course it is hard to read an author's earlier work without our awareness of what came later; good writers help create the context in which we read them. Jarrell's aside is a good one, whether deserved by Wilbur or not -- think of how often success turns a performer into a very safely-played parody of her- or himself.

[Alan Sullivan]

What bothers me is that, lacking further context, I cannot quite place what it was Jarrell was asking of Wilbur at that time. What sort of chance-taking did he long to see?

I would argue that the signs of the mature Wilbur were difficult to discern in <u>The Beautiful Changes</u>, which was published in 1947. To my mind "Praise in Summer" is the only first-rate poem in the book. Elsewhere we find a great deal of extremely clever and skilled verse, much of which also seems chilly and detached, as Kate remarks above.

The second book, <u>Ceremony</u>, has several standouts, including the title poem. In its close "Ceremony" hints at something crucial to an understanding of the author's work. I shall quote the final sentence, stranding the rhyme scheme, but not the sense, which refers to the "feigning lady" in a painting by Bazille. "What's lightly hid is deepest understood, / And when with social smile and formal dress / She teaches leaves to courtsey and quadrille, / I think there are most tigers in the wood."

I find in this passage an oblique statement of the poet's intent. He is civilizing an untamed heart, and the degree of stylization in his early verse is proportional to the intensity of underlying emotion. That is, he distances himself the most when he is nearest to losing control. His formality and his civility are survival tactics for a man beset by strong feelings.

It is no surprise that such a man, as he mellows with age, gradually learns to speak more directly. We find an early hint of his mature voice in another poem from <u>Ceremony</u>. To my mind "The Pardon" is one of Wilbur's finest works in a lifetime, and it achieves a supremely difficult feat--unsentimental sentimentality.

Elsewhere on the site, Kate and others, discussing sentimentality, considered a poem from Wilbur's third book, which some regarded as wantonly sentimental. "Boy at the Window" may be an overshot in the direction Wilbur was trying to go. I hope you will all read his new book <u>Mayflies</u> to see where a lifetime of trial and occasional error has culminated. I wonder what Jarrell would think now, if he could read it all.

Alan Sullivan

[Richard Wakefield]

Alan, the lines from "Ceremony" are lovely of themselves and also a fittingly oblique ars poetica. How better to state the principle of indirection than indirectly? I agree, too, often the control of formality is a paradoxical sign of extremes of feeling, and so those little departures from form become all the more telling.
It is hard to tell from Jarrell's essay what he would have Wilbur do, so I can only speculate that like many of his contemporaries, Jarrell wanted poetry to "matter" as part of the strife and controversy of contemporary times; many critics and poets (I'm not sure that Jarrell was among them) assumed that traditional forms were inadequate to the task, or even that they were outright treacherous to it.
Richard