This rather long excerpt from Alan Sullivans article on Richard Wilbur, from the current Sewanee Review, is still not long enough to do the piece justice. I've chosen this section, however, because Alan here discusses the meaning of form or, at least, the meaning of Wilbur's preference for form. It seems to me an important topic for those of us who keep finding ourselves writing in rhyme and meter. It seems important, too, as a way to understanding in part why rhyme and meter continue to engage such a large share of the audience for poetry.
The impulse to praise places Wilbur at odds with most contemporary poets, who seem more disposed to damn, with dreary predictability, their nation, their parents or themselves. In “Cottage Street, 1953,” Wilbur recalls after many years an awkward afternoon with the young Sylvia Plath, whom he met at the behest of elderly Edna Ward, “to exemplify / The published poet in his happiness, / Thus cheering Sylvia, who has wished to die.” Here for once, though very gently, Wilbur appears to venture a criticism, as even the mannerly sometimes must, calling Plath’s poetry “free and helpless and unjust.” This statement would be less paradoxical than it seems, if “free” referred only to the form of Plath’s poems, as conceived by someone who was assuredly unfree in every other respect. Yet Wilbur will not let us read more into “Cottage Street, 1953” than he wishes. Questioned by the editor of an anthology that includes this poem, he cautiously renounced any challenge to vers libre or to Plath’s poetic legacy. His comments were later incorporated in his second book of essays: “The poems of Sylvia’s last days were brilliant, and they were free in the sense that they came fast and well; they were helpless and unjust because she was writing out of an ill condition of mind in which she could not do justice to anything but her own feelings. There is a limit to the utility of a poetry so skewed and so personal, but I say that with regret and in no spirit of blame.” (The Catbird’s Song, 149.)
One can sympathize with this man of mild and forgiving temperament, who desires to steer clear of the virulent literary disputes so characteristic of our time. Yet his use of the word “utility” raises a fundamental question. What good is poetry? Here Wilbur places himself at odds with Poe, for whom poetry required no justification. Obviously Plath’s work, whether or not it is any good in itself, was no good at all for her, since it failed to keep her sane and alive; nor has it been good for others, since it justifies their grievances and perpetuates their miseries. We can never entirely separate the aesthetic from the practical (or as some would say, from the political). Words may be abstractions, but their use has palpable consequences. More than a millennium ago, the T’ang poets of China asserted that worthy poetry should be rich in feng and ya, which Arthur Waley translated as “criticism of one’s rules” and “moral guidance to the masses.” (Translations from the Chinese, 134.) Wilbur’s concern for “utility” aligns him with such venerable forebears and casts him, whether he likes it or not, in mortal opposition to the poetry of solipsism, which so signally lacks feng and ya. The helplessness of victims may explain but cannot excuse injustices committed by the victimized. If Wilbur seems reluctant to judge, he is perhaps recalling the Biblical injunction to “judge not, lest ye be judged.” Yet some corrective is surely required for the contemporary view of judgement as a secular sin. Why should we not be able to judge as Wilbur prescribes—without blame?
In his most recent work Wilbur looks back on life and forward at death, while seeming perfectly poised between gratitude and regret. Like many poets who survive to old age, Wilbur has overseen the publication of a volume collecting his previous books, then continued writing. His new book of verse and translations is titled Mayflies. Unlike Frost, to whom his title implicitly alludes, Wilbur has retained his full powers late in life. With remarkable poems like “Fabrications” and “Icons,” he reflects upon artifice just as Yeats did in the late poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” Unlike Yeats, for whom art is essentially hermetic, Wilbur sees the artist engaging in a civil act which extends and enriches the divine order with a human one. This ideal is antithetical to the destructive impulse lately rampant in the arts, and it links Wilbur not only with the T’ang Chinese, but also with poets of the Enlightenment like Pope and Boileau. Of course there is always the peril of hubris for artists who regard their works as glimmers of divinity. Wilbur has resisted such temptations more successfully than Faust. He has never forgotten that art is compounded of baser stuff as well, that it can be a surrogate for love and a defense against the dread of death. Consider the opening stanza of “Icons.”
They are one answer to the human need
For a second life, and they exist for us
In the secular heaven of photography,
Safe in emulsion’s cloud.
Though unrhymed, the language of this nine-stanza meditation is so dense with sound and so fraught with meaning that no formalist could object. As always, Wilbur tends to make his key points obliquely. “One answer” implies another, or many others, or none at all. Faith is a choice, Wilbur tells us, not a gift. He declines to choose for his readers. We must decide for ourselves. But he does warn us that all our icons are bound to “Slip unaccountably into the morgues / And archives of this world.” So too, of course, with poetry, bound for dusty stacks or the further reaches of cyberspace. Yet the poet labors on. Here he has chosen form itself as an implicit statement. This sort of verse is indeed one answer to the continuing challenge of vers libre, whose practitioners have now mostly descended to such a state of subliteracy that they would not even recognize the supple measure of Wilbur’s lines, and might think, from the absence of rhyme, that he has defected at last to their camp. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Wilbur demonstrates with “Fabrications,” another large unrhymed meditation in which he triumphantly asserts the continuity of humanly-devised and natural forms as aspects of a larger creation. Wilbur also twines this theme into the finest love poem I have seen in recent years, which I quote here in full, as it appeared in The New Yorker on Valentine’s Day, 1997:
For C.
After the clash of elevator gates
And the long sinking, she emerges where,
A slight thing in the morning’s crosstown glare,
She looks up toward the window where he waits,
Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest
Of the huge traffic bound forever west.
On such grand scale do lovers say goodbye—
Even this other pair whose high romance
Had only the duration of a dance,
And who, now taking leave with stricken eye,
See each in each a whole new life foregone.
For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn,
Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these
Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief
And baggage, yet with something like relief,
It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas
To cancel out their crossing and unmake
The amorous rough and tumble of their wake.
We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse
And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share
The frequent vistas of their large despair,
Where love and all are swept to nothingness;
Still there’s a certain scope in that long love
Which constant spirits are the keepers of,
And which, though taken to be tame and staid,
Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,
A passion joined to courtesy and art
Which has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament.
In this age of tawdry public affairs, it is rare indeed to encounter a paean to fidelity, but it seems fitting that such a poem should be written in pentameter sestets. Few forms could so decisively signal “constant spirits.” Yet some readers react otherwise. Though his measures are strict, Wilbur often tantalizes with thematic ambiguities. California poet Suzanne Doyle thinks that the passion of the initial stanzas undercuts the conclusion, that regret for missed opportunities outweighs the gratitude for a “long love.” I can see where a woman might feel some disquiet at this possibility. Men have wandering hearts. Another Californian, Dana Gioia, has written in “Summer Storm” how “memory insists on pining / For places it never went / As if life would be happier / Just by being different.” (The Dark Horse, issue 4.)
|
Linear Mode
