Retroview: Trouble Kept at Bay

My excellent freshman-year English professor, Richard Lee Francis, called upon the class one week to compare Richard Wilbur and Robert Lowell. This was in 1968, and Lowell had become a sort of titanic figure in the eyes of English professors, at least in the Northeast, and I realized that Mr. Francis wanted us to find that Lowell’s poems were more exciting, original, and disturbing than Wilbur’s. I resisted this view, maybe just because I wanted to stand out from the group, and I wrote a paper praising a few of Wilbur’s poems for their “quiet grace.” However, when I tried to become a poet myself I was (like most of my peers) influenced by the Lowell of Life Studies, and as the decades passed I learned to speak of Wilbur in a mildly condescending tone as a poet of outmoded decorum and complacency.

And yet from time to time over the many years, I’ve read or reread a poem by Wilbur and realized I was glad it was in the world, with its studied gentleness and rhetorical poise. And recently I happened to focus on his 1969 volume Walking to Sleep—and appreciation grew in me; here I want to write about what I like in that book and to think about why I now can value the book in a way that my younger self could not.

To be alive is big trouble, right? Most contemporary poetry suggests so, whether the trouble flows from personal trauma or from society’s sickness. A speaker’s feelings of endangerment or fear or rage or injury or remorse or guilt or desperate desire or desperate confusion may be declared rather directly, or more circuitously via metaphor and irony, but we are usually quite aware that big trouble is in the air. Richard Wilbur’s poetry is not oblivious of trouble but it can seem to be so at first glance and even second glance. His sensibility prizes the sociable civility whereby trouble can be acknowledged so briefly and lightly that it need not embarrass anyone; only the attuned and discerning reader will infer the trouble underlying, or slyly intruding into, a given poem. Smoothness and shapeliness are felt by this poet to be significant values for a poem—not, I want to argue, merely for the sake of aesthetic pleasantness, but because they help protect us from the blades of fear, anger, desire, remorse, and confusion.

There’s no doubt that Wilbur has paid a price for such priorities. He has been viewed as mildly outdated ever since the Fifties! To make a case for him as a “great” or “major” poet (unless “major” means merely “well-published across many decades”) would be difficult and dubious, I think. Wilbur’s style and his choice of subjects lean decisively away from any ferocity or heat of ambition, any campaign to be “the voice of an era.” However, since 1969 we’ve seen inflated claims made for so many poets—Lowell, Berryman, Wright, Levertov, Merwin, Kinnell, Merrill, Rich, Levine, Clampitt, Strand, others—and whose claims have stayed convincing? (I set aside the aberration of Ashbery.) It seems there is something about American culture since Frost, Stevens, and Eliot that militates against greatness.

What I want to do, then, is not to make a case for Wilbur as great, or even especially “important,” and not to take the measure of his entire oeuvre—other critics will be attempting that soon (Wilbur is ninety-six years old)—but to say, here is this book from 1969 featuring some un-strident poetic achievements that repay careful attention.

When Walking to Sleep appeared in 1969 the United States had been grotesquely mired in the Vietnam War for at least four years. Most poets were expressing horror and outrage. Where was Wilbur’s horror and outrage? Instead of a grim title like The Teeth-Mother Naked at Last (Robert Bly, 1970), or The Book of Nightmares (Galway Kinnell, 1971), Wilbur’s book title virtually begged to be mocked as placid or soporific. Many of the poems in it were “nature...