"To Mean What Once We Said": Richard Wilbur Celebrates the Fourth of July

This paper develops an intertextual reading of Richard Wilbur's "The Fourth of July," addressing two key topics. Most of the poem develops an allusive and nuanced consideration of the ways in which practices of naming shape and are shaped by contingent human attitudes and behaviors. Wilbur's treatment of this first topic provides a context for his measured approach to the second, the persistence in "the land of the free" of injustices rationalized with regard to differences of skin color.