The Reflexive Art of Richard Wilbur

J.M. REIBETANZ The Reflexive Art of Richard Wilbur Richard Wilbur's critics have charted his I distinctive voice-print' (Leithauser , 286) with considerable, though divided, corrunentary on whatis agreed to be at the heart of his craft - his handling of language.1 The debate has revolved around the question of whether Wilbur's delight in the urbane wordscape ofthe poem somehowpreventshim from touchingthe suffering of the world around him. I propose to explore a characteristic signature of his wordscapes which, I think, pre-empts argument on the divergence of word from world, the supposed incongruencebetween the virtuosity ofhis verbal mastery and the 'lived-in experience' of the heart (Holmes, 75). It is true that Wilbur's is not what Wordsworth would call the ordinary language of men; Wilbur has not so much looked into his heart to write, as he has plumbed the verbal medium.~ His language declares its fabric, its' material presence, in every word. It displays what he calls the 'sure / And special signature' of the poet as maker (129).3 It is self-referential. Wilbur's poems ask to be read as reflexive acts of meditation upon their own essential nature, whatever else they may claim to be about. I propose to explore the reflexivity of Wilbur's poetry, on the assumption that it is explicit in many and implicit in all of his poems, and that it is indispensable to an understanding of 'The Mind-Reader' and New Poems. Widely explored as a theory of poetics and narrative, reflexivity implies 'that-art does not innocently reflect or convey reality; rather, it creates or signifies it' (Hutcheon, 220). Robert Siegle argues further that it is a mistake to confine reflexivity to those texts that take the making of their art as their 1 SeeSalingerfor a collectionofrepresentative work on Wilbur through 1982. See also Bixler for an annotated guide to books, articles, and reviews on Wilbur through 1991. 2 Arguing from Helen Vendler's premise that Wallace Stevens cannot be read on the Wordsworthian model, that his words 'are almost always deflected from their common denotation' (Vendler, 47), Eleanor Cook characterizes this deflection as 'word-play.' But as Cook argues, word-play is more than a singular feature ofStevens's poetic method: 'all language maybe thought ofas functioning through the interplay ofdialecticand grammar and rhetoric.... Word-playpOints to relations already there in language; it is not justadded on' (Cook, 3). Reading Wilbur reflexively posits a similar kind of deflection from a purely denotative to a self-conscious poetic language. 3 All references to Wilbur's poetry are quoted from New and Collected Poems and are cited by page numbers in the text. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2, SPRING 1998 THE REFLEXIVE ART OF RICHARD WILBUR 593 subject matter.4 Reflexivity oflyric metaphor is not confined to those poems that are rnetapoeic. In lyric, the fabric of metaphor is always created in a self-conscious mode, never effacing awareness of its own shaping.power. What the lyric poem shapes is itself, though it may claim to be engaged in a visionary or a representational quest. Wilbur's poetry seems to be particularly and acutely conscious of the reflexive ground of all such quests. Critics have been so preoccupied with Wilbur's verbal dexterity and at the same time so concerned to assure us that his poetry remains devoted to the world's Jhunks and colors' (233) that they often miss the propensity of Wilbur's metaphors to reflect themselves back upon the poem and constitute themselves as an identity of poetic subject and process. Our approaches to Wilburhavebeen determined largelyby his quarrel with Poe (Responses, 125),5 interpreted as an either/or proposition, a choice of imaginative transcendence of the world or of homage to the world's sensible objects. But Wilbur's poetry chooses neither of these. Rather it creates itself as a territory of uncertainty, where the poet stakes his peculiar claim. Or to vary the metaphor, a poem 'is tributary / To the great lies told with the eyes half-shut / That have the truth in view' (10-11). What follows here is a close reading of some early and middle poems, of...