The Mind-Reader: New Poems by Richard Wilbur, and: The Compass Flower by W. S. Merwin (review)

Reviews The Mind-Reader: New Poems. By Richard Wilbur. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. 67 pages, $6.95.) The Compass Flower. By W. S. Merwin. (New York: Atheneum, 1977. 94 pages, $4.95.) If, in 1952, one had been predicting the future of American poetry, the average wise man would have laid his money on Richard Wilbur: next to Robert Lowell, Wilbur was the figure. W. S. Merwin, a few years younger, had just published his first book; he was a rising, if not yet a fixed, star. Both of them were brilliant, sensitive, and verbally gifted men who knew their craft. They were, in brief, members of the poetic “establishment” (but neither then nor now westerners). However, establishments change. The kind of verbal wit that char­ acterized and characterizes Wilbur is no longer quite acceptable, especially as it demands allegiance to an established form. Wilbur is a traditional (one might even say “English”) poet. He begins lines with a capital; he used and uses metrics and rhyme. And the new orthodoxy rejects metrics and rhyme. But, too, his poetry contains history, and despite the small obeisances towards Pound, present American poetry denies history and insists upon experience. Therefore, one can find a bad review of Wilbur in the organs of the new establishment. He is nearly out of fashion — but still too important to be ignored (I use “fashion” here not as a pejorative, but as a descriptive, term). Merwin was never quite so “English.” From the beginning his poetry was more international, touched by surrealism (both he and Wilbur are distinguished translators). And although both of them would be ignored in such an anthology as Donald M. Allen’s one-time important — and aggressively tendentious — The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, a book that helped re-shape American verse, it is Merwin who has come into the seventies as the man in fashion. He is not a cult figure; his acceptance is a recognition of a presence. He somehow fits the present American schools: “Whitmanian,” the remainders of Black Mountain and deep image, the 322 Western American Literature flourishing New York. Iambs in Merwin are accidental; his lines are never equal; he uses capitals as in prose and periods not at all. . . . Now, despite some rather silly attempts by certain modern critics and poets at denying there is need for a canon (invariably in the service of setting up a different one), it is necessary to judge poets, to compare them. But there is a level at which one does not need to do so. Both Wilbur and Merwin are excellent poets, among our very best. They simply differ. Wilbur’s book is considerably the shorter. And it is not his best book, although there are some fine poems in it. The title poem, “The MindReader ,” is a Browningesque (a variable blank verse) dramatic monologue. The speaker, a drunken, aging Italian, meditates upon the unfortunate gift which ties him irrevocably to others with a kind of intensity that quite literally drives him to drink: The world usurps me ceaselessly; my sixth And never-resting sense is a cheap room Black with the anger of insomnia, Whose wall-boards vibrate with the mutters, plaints, And flushings of the race. But the poem is not just a persona, a characterization: it is, in its way, another poem about the creative spirit, the poet, who feels himself into the world of others. But the world of others is a world of pain. Suffering is existence. And so, too, the poem is about the problem of existence, of the world. It goes towards its close with the question, “Is there some huge attention, do you think, / Which suffers us and is inviolate,” which “overhearjs ] . . . / In the worst rancor a deflected sweetness? / I should be glad to know it.” Is there meaning, resolution, in our human suffering? Or does it all end, as the poem ends, with the human ironically reasserted: the mindreader remarks, with a multiple intent, to the listener (who must be a middle-aged American literature teacher, i.e., the kind of people who read this poetry) : “Ah, you have read my mind. One more, perhaps . . . / A mezzo-litro...