36 November - December 2008

Wilbur, A.M. ’47, JF ’50, sent one of those battlefield poems tohis wife, Charlee, who showed it to a friend who was an editor atthe Saturday Evening Post. The magazine immediately published it.Wilbur mailed many more poems home; when he left the army,he had $400, a wife and daughter to support, and a stack ofwartime poetry. On the GI Bill, he enrolled in a Harvard doctoralprogram in English literature. “I figured I’d become a greatscholar of Europe in the seventeenth century,” he recalls. Thestack of poems, joined by others that he continued to write, grewin a desk drawer.

In Cambridge, the Wilburs became friends with André duBouchet, A.M. ’46, a Frenchman who helped found a little liter-ary magazine called Foreground. “We used to sit around in a livingroom translating each other from French into English, and Eng-lish into French,” Wilbur remembers. “At that time, I hadn’ttaken myself seriously as a professional poet.” But Charlee had.Without telling her husband, she gave some of his poems to duBouchet. “He came back in an hour and kissed me on bothcheeks,” says Wilbur, “and he exclaimed, ‘You’re a poet!’ ”

During the next six decades, the rest of the world has come toshare du Bouchet’s opinion. Wilbur has published 10 volumes ofpoetry, as well as many translations: of classic French plays andof poets writing in French, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish,Hungarian, and Bulgarian. He served as poet laureate of theUnited States from 1987 to 1988. His third book, Things of ThisWorld, won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the NationalBook Award; when his Ne w and CollectedPoems won another Pulitzer in 1989, he becamethe only living American poet with twoPulitzers. In a 2004 Ne w Yorker review of

Wilbur’s Collected Poems 1943-2004, critic Adam Kirsch ’97 wrote,“No other twentieth-century American poet, with the possibleexception of James Merrill, demonstrates such a Mozartean fe-licity in the writing of verse. This is partly a matter of formalmastery: Wilbur has written the best blank verse of any Ameri-can poet since Frost.”

Near the fairgrounds in the western Massachusetts townof Cummington, a gently winding country road leads to themodern yet rustic home, across from a dairy farm, where Wilburhas lived since 1965. He manages alone now, with a modicum ofdomestic help; Charlee passed away in 2007 after a long illness.Near the house rises a barn-like studio, where the poet, now 87,writes daily; on its walls are framed theatre posters from playson which he has worked, including The Misanthrope (translator)and Candide (lyricist).

The wooded 80-acre property is serene on a summer after-noon. Thriving gardens, a tennis court, and a sparkling aqua-blueswimming pool surround the house, and an older white Mer-cedes rests placidly in a curving driveway under a porte--cochère.These are not the digs of a starving poet.

In many ways Wilbur has led a charmed life. Tall, robust, andcheerful, he’s a physically active man who swims and gardens, andhas been for much of his life an accomplished tennis player. He andCharlee had “the closest kind of marriage,” according to theirlongtime friend Daniel Aaron, Thomas professor of English and

American literature emeritus. The marriageproduced one daughter, Ellen, a writer (seepage 40), and three sons, Christopher, Nathan,and Aaron, none of whom has entered the lit-

Poetic PatriarchThe singular Richard Wilbur displays

a “Mozartean felicity” with verse.

by Craig Lambert

During the extended World War II battle of Monte Cassino, Richard Wilbur spent a

lot of time in a foxhole. The Germans had pinned down his army division in a valley,

firing their 88s from the hills above. “As Waugh said, a lot of war is just waiting around,”

says Wilbur, who used that waiting time to read Edgar Allan Poe, among others, and to

write poems. Years later, he observed that if there were no atheists in foxholes, there were

plenty of poets. “Poems were a way of putting your world in order, a bit,” he explains.

P h o t o g r a p h s b y S t u R o s n e r

erary life. Wilbur is a lover of jazz and a great joker who drawsThurber-like cartoons. A cryptographer in the army, he enjoyspuzzles and vanquishes books of crosswords in odd moments.

Wilbur’s strong feeling for plants, animals, and natural phe-nomena infuses many of his poems. Rural life has always appealedto him; though born in New York City, he grew up on the gentle-man’s farm of a retired English textile manufacturer in NorthCaldwell, New Jersey: “All the benefits of country living, withoutthe labor,” he says. It was not an arty home, but Wilbur recalls, “Ifyou wrote anything, drew any-thing, or played any instrument,it was approved of. That wasbetter than an atmosphere ofexhortation.” His father was aportrait painter (“All he want-ed to do was paint”) and hismother came from a long lineof journalists; when Wilburedited the student paper atMontclair High School in NewJersey and later at Amherst Col-lege, from which he graduatedin 1942, he wrote everythingfrom reports on wrestlingmatches to editorials, news, andfeatures, and drew cartoons. “Ithought I might follow a familytradition and be a multiple-threat journalist,” he says.

But he also published a fewpoems in those student papers,and as a teenager listenedto Robert Frost reading hisown poems at the MontclairWomen’s Club, the first timeWilbur had ever heard a poetread to an audience. (Later, helearned that Charlee’s grandfa-ther, clergyman William HayesWard, was the first person topublish a Frost poem, in theNew York Independent.)

When he arrived in Cam-bridge in the fall of 1946, “theflavor of Harvard was quite in-toxicating, because of the greatinflux of former servicemen onthe GI Bill,” Wilbur says. “Peo-ple were really spoiling to read,write, and talk about literatureand the arts. They were starved,and just giddy with the tran-sition. Everyone felt lucky.”Archibald MacLeish, Boylstonprofessor of rhetoric and ora-tory, was soon to teach a poetry

course, and talented young poets like Maxine Kumin ’46, A.M. ’48,John Ashbery ’49, Robert Creeley ’49, Frank O’Hara ’50, RobertBly ’50, Donald Hall ’51, and Adrienne Rich ’51 populated the class-rooms. Wilbur studied Poe with Hall, and notes that even though“Bly never took a course with me, I did teach him how to throw aboomerang. I took him down to the football field, gave him his in-structions, and he turned out to be a promising boomeranger.”

Wilbur’s first big break came when André du Bouchet sentsome of his early work to the publishing firm Reynal & Hitch-

cock, which was on the look-out for new talent. “Soon I hada phone call saying, ‘Mr. Wil-bur, we’d like to publish a bookof your poetry,’ ” he recalls.“That’s the most painless pathto getting a book published I’veever heard!” The result was TheBeautiful Changes (1947).

In December 1948, Wilbursent the Ne w Yorker a poemcalled “Year’s End.” Soon, NewYorker editor Katherine S.White was on the phone. “Mr.Wilbur, we want to use yourpoem in our year-end issue,”she said. “There’s no time tosend you proofs, so we’ll haveto talk through it on thephone.” Wilbur quickly as-sented. “You don’t seem to haveany understanding of the di≠er-ence between which and that,”she began. “I don’t at all,” Wil-bur admitted. “Which soundslike a brisk word and that is asoft-sounding word.” Whitereplied, “Fowler [author of Mod-ern English Usage] wouldn’t findthat acceptable,” then added,“But Fowler was British, wasn’the, and we’re an American mag-azine, so we’ll let it go.”

Fortune soon smiled on himagain. He had taken his lan-guage exams in German andwas on his way to a Harvarddoctorate when, after only oneyear of postgraduate study, “bytremendous luck, I was takeninto the Society of Fellows.”Professor of history and litera-ture F.O. Matthiessen and Eng-lish professor Harry Levin, a se-nior fellow of the society,backed him for the prestigiousfellowship, which gave him free

38 November - December 2008

“You can be a scholar if you like, but I assure you that

The WriterIn her room at the prow of the houseWhere light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearingFrom her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keysLike a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuffOf her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,And then she is at it again with a bunched clamorOf strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starlingWhich was trapped in that very room, two years ago;How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creatureBatter against the brilliance, drop like a gloveTo the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,For the wits to try it again; and how our spiritsRose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,Beating a smooth course for the right windowAnd clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wishWhat I wished you before, but harder.

COPYRIGHT © RICHARD WILBUR. REPRINTED FROM COLLECTED POEMS, 1943-2004 (HARCOURT). ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED WITH PERMISSION

Harvard Magazine 39

rein for independent study at Harvard from 1947 to 1950. The Beauti-ful Changes appeared just as his fellowship began. “I was alwaystorn between scholarship and writing poems,” he says, “so I had aconfusion about who I was. The happiest moment was when[McLean professor of ancient and modern history] Crane Brinton,who chaired the Society of Fellows, told me, ‘You can be a scholarif you like, but I assure you that the poetry is enough.’ That wasliberating for me to hear.”

At that time, Wilbur says, “Harvard regarded a three-yearstretch in the Society of Fellows as the equivalent of a doctor-ate,” and consequently he was appointed assistant professor ofEnglish in the fall of 1950. He taught a seminar on Poe, a class inmodern American and English poetry, and a writing class on theshort story; he also assisted University Professor I.A. Richards inan experimental freshman humanities course. The literary resur-gence that had thrilled Wilbur after the war was intensifying.Poetry readings were suddenly popular. “Before the late 1940s,there hadn’t been too many people trotting around America giv-ing poems in auditoria,” Wilbur points out. “Suddenly, quiteyoung poets like me had frequent opportunities to read.”

When Wallace Stevens ’01, Litt.D. ’51, first read at Harvard inthe late 1940s, “No one had imagined what kind of audience hewould draw,” Wilbur recalls. Stevens was scheduled to read inEmerson Hall, but an hour beforehand, “F.O. Matthiessen pokedhis head in the door and saw that the room was full,” so hemoved the venue to Sever; it soon overflowed, forcing the audi-ence to shift once more, to the Fogg Museum’s auditorium. “I re-member how shocked Stevens looked when he saw the size ofthe audience,” Wilbur adds. When T. S. Eliot ’10 lectured in

Sanders Theatre, “Those who arrived late beat on the doors,shouting, ‘Let us in! Let us in!’ ”

Wilbur’s Ceremony and Other Poems appeared in 1950; he dedicatedit to his mentor Matthiessen, who leapt to his death from a Bostonhotel window that year. The New Critics, who reigned in the liter-ary establishment of that time, welcomed the book. “I was veryfortunate,” Wilbur says. “Of course I had my refusals, but I wasgreatly encouraged from the beginning. Encourage-ment is di≠erent from adulation, which could louseyou up: it could lead you to change your tune.”

One early encourager was Robert Frost ’01, Litt.D.’37, whom Wilbur cites as an inspiration. After thewar, Frost spent some winters living in Cambridge,on Riedesel Street, o≠ Brattle Street; Wilbur got toknow him there and also at the Bread Loaf Writers’Conference in Vermont. Later, Frost dined and stayed with theWilburs. “When my first book came out, Frost spoke very kindlyof it to my wife—not to me—over the phone,” Wilbur says. “I wasaware that he read what I wrote as it came out. The first time hepraised a specific poem was when I published ‘The Puritans.’ AtDartmouth, he told me, ‘That’s the best little poem I’ve seen inquite a while.’ I was so flustered that I began saying somethingabout the poem, but Frost interrupted to say, ‘Now, wait—ifyou’re going to explain it to me, I won’t like it anymore.’ Frostdidn’t like his poems, or any poems, to be put into other words.”

In 1950, Wilbur was among the founders of the Poets’ Theatrein Cambridge. Other prime movers included Ashbery, Hall,O’Hara, MacLeish, Peter Davison ’49, Edward Gorey ’50, Alison

the poetry is enough.”

Visit harvard-mag.com/extras to hear RichardWilbur read hispoem “TheWriter.”

Wilbur-MF.qxp 10/9/08 1:36 PM Page 39

Lurie ’47, and Richard Eberhart, G ’33. (The Poets’ Theatre stagedplays until 1968, when fire destroyed its home on Palmer Street; itrevived in 1988 and remains active today.) The group’s produc-tions ranged from Change Your Bedding, a comedy by O’Hara(whom Wilbur recalls as “breezy and amusing”), to a couple ofMacLeish’s radio plays from the 1930s, to a staging of Oedipus atColonus in the original Greek. “It was a time of great liveliness, ex-citement, and innovation,” says Wilbur, who finds himself be-mused “when people speak dismissively of the 1950s, as if theyhad been a tame and suppressed time, and everything beganwith Allen Ginsburg.”

In 1955, the Poets’ Theatre produced Wilbur’s translation ofThe Misanthrope by Molière, with Davison playing the lead. Theplay proved such a hit that after two nights, the productionmoved to a big auditorium at MIT. His Misanthrope translationsoon led to Wilbur’s most famous collaboration, with LillianHellman and Leonard Bernstein ’39 on Candide, the 1956 Broad-way musical based on Voltaire’s novella.

Hellman conceived the idea of staging Candide and enlistedBernstein to write some music. Several writers, includingDorothy Parker and James Agee ’32, John Latouche, Bernstein andhis wife, Felicia, and Hellman, contributed lyrics. But Wilbur be-came the primary lyricist (“I wrote or rewrote 82.5 percent of thelyrics,” he says—not facetiously, but following his theatricalagent’s calculation) after Harry Levin recommended him to Hell-man, citing his work on The Misanthrope. “If he can do one wittyFrenchman,” Levin said, “I imagine he could do another.”

In the summer of 1955, all the principals rented houses onMartha’s Vineyard and worked on Candide each day, typicallymeeting at Bernstein’s place, with him at the piano. “We allthought we had singing voices,” Wilbur recalls, smiling. Eachtime Hellman wrote a scene, the others would make it into a mu-sical number, transforming Candide from a play to a comic op-

eretta. “Lenny was full of energy and urgency,” Wilbur says. “Heand I quarreled occasionally as to whether the music or wordsshould be written first. One time I wrote a very good lyric, theclosest thing to Voltaire, and Lenny couldn’t think of a tune forit. After a few days, director Tyrone Guthrie chided him, saying.‘Lenny, we know you were water-skiing yesterday, not trying toproduce a tune for Richard’s lyric.’ ” (Bernstein found a melody.)

Candide opened to favorable reviews, “but the praise, by BrooksAtkinson [’17] in the New York Times, for example, made it soundtoo highbrow for block-ticket buying,” Wilbur says. The showclosed after a three-month run. “The main defect of the show isthe defect of Candide,” he observes. “It’s the same joke over andover.” Though technically a flop, Candide has triumphed in thelong run, thanks to a continuing series of revisions and revivals.Wilbur collects royalties whenever its overture is played, and oc-casionally still gets requests for new lyrics. (Dick Cavett’s televi-sion show used the aria “Glitter and Be Gay” as theme music.)

In the mid 1960s, he collaborated with the French composerMichel Legrand on a musical adaptation of the 1943 play The Mad-woman of Chaillot, by Jean Giraudoux, but the show’s inexperi-enced producer lost control of the adaptation rights, scuttlingthe project. “Once I had lost so much hard work, I said, ‘To hellwith musical theater, I’m going to stick with my poetry, teaching,and translations,’” Wilbur explains. (Today, his translations ofMolière, Racine, and Corneille have become standard, and criticshave called his renderings of Baudelaire and many other poetsthe best versions available in English. He knows French, “espe-cially seventeenth-century dramatic language,” and can readDante in Italian; for languages like Russian and Bulgarian, he getshelp from scholars and native speakers.)

After a year at the American Academy in Rome and twoyears teaching at Wellesley, Wilbur joined the Wesleyan College

40 November - December 2008

At age five, Ellen Wilbur asked herparents for a typewriter for Christmas.Pecking at its keys, “I was in heaven,” sherecalls, “sitting in that same pose I now fallinto, trying to put things into words.”Decades later, her father, poet RichardWilbur, offered a paternal perspective onEllen’s fledgling struggles with languageand art in his poem “The Writer” (see page38). “From the first, we knew Ellen had agift, and told her so,” he says. “But I don’tthink she has learned anything from me—she’s a natural writer. She has a perfectsense of narrative structure that I don’thave at all; it amazes me.”

Editors and fellow authors have con-curred. A short-story writer, Ellen Wilbur, aBunting Institute fellow in 1990-91, has asmall, finely wrought body of work pub-lished in prestigious venues such asPloughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review,Shenandoah, The Georgia Review, The HarvardReview, The Yale Review, Agni, and New Let-

ters. Her fiction has been included in eightanthologies, including two Pushcart Prizevolumes. In 1984, Stuart Wright’s PalaemonPress Limited published Wind and Birds andHuman Voices. “Skilled, sensitive, and daringin their reach,” wrote Eudora Welty of thiscollection of her short fictions, “they areclearly the work of a born writer.”

Early on, Ellen Wilbur tried writing anovel, but soon recognized short fiction asher métier. “The whole excitement of a shortstory is the tension in it,” she explains. “Everyword is important. When it works, it ’sthrilling.” (Her father has written only oneshort story in his career, in the New Mexicodesert in 1952. He comments that “the result,shall we say, was rather arid.”) The yarnsRichard Wilbur invented to tell Ellen andher brothers when they were childrenhelped fuel her affinity for fiction. “He

taught me the joy of imaginary play,” shesays. “He made the mind and imaginingthings more fascinating than anything else.”

Today, Wilbur supervises the after-school program for beginners and kinder-gartners at Shady Hill School in Cam-bridge. She has also edited The Consolationsof God (Eerdmans, 2003), a collection of ser-mons by Phillips Brooks, A.B. 1855, S.T.D.’77, who was, for more than 20 years, rectorof Trinity Church in Boston, where sheworships. (“Even in print, and at the re-move of a century, Brooks sounds well,”wrote Pusey Minister in the MemorialChurch Peter J. Gomes in a foreword,“which is no small thing when few ser-mons last beyond lunchtime.”) Wilbur haseven ventured into verse. “If you can be-lieve it, I started out writing poetry,” shesays. “I had the nerve and the gall and wasutterly fearless. Maybe it was because I wasa girl—or my father was so good that I did-n’t worry about comparisons.”

Filial Fiction

faculty in 1957 and stayed for 20 years. To “keep his hand in” as awriter, he requested, and received, every third semester o≠ withpay. He moved to Smith College for 10 more years of teaching be-fore retiring in 1986.

He always preferred subject-matter courses to creative-writ-ing seminars, and consistently spent six or seven hours preparingfor each hour of class time. “Looking back on 40 years of teach-ing, the thing I don’t like about my performance is that I alwayscared too much about seeming omniscient, and didn’t let the stu-dents do as much talking as theyshould have,” he says. “They learnit when they say it for themselves,and sometimes students sittingaround a table discover some-thing quite fresh. It’s satisfyingwhen they find out things that noone had found out before.”

In 1956, Things of This World ap-peared, winning the Pulitzer Prizeand National Book Award; it con-tains what is probably Wilbur’sbest-known poem, “Love Calls Usto the Things of This World.” Afterthis pinnacle of success, years ofcritical disparagement followed.“Beginning in the 1960s, to writemy kind of poetry, to write inmeter and often in rhyme, wasseen as altogether retrograde andold-hat,” he explains. The intro-spective “confessional” poetrypopularized by Robert Lowell ’39,Litt.D. ’66, Anne Sexton, and SylviaPlath (Wilbur’s poem “CottageStreet, 1953” describes his singularmeeting with the suicidal Plath)took poetry in a direction thatcontrasted sharply with Wilbur’smore oblique approach to self-ex-pression. “When those distinc-tions between ‘palefaces’ and ‘red-skins’ came around, I was in-variably a ‘paleface,’ ” he says inJeanne Braham’s 2007 book TheLight within the Light, which profilesfour modern poets, “and when po-etry was dubbed either ‘raw’ or‘cooked,’ mine was definitely‘cooked.’”

Though he says that every newpoem is an experiment, Wilbur isno avant-gardist; he has steepedhimself in the history of his artsince antiquity, and builds on thisheritage. “Wilbur’s collectionsdouble as sparkling cyclopedias offorms,” writes associate professorof English Stephen Burt, in ascholarly critique, “not just son-

nets and villanelles but taut quatrains, couplets of all sorts,Provençal ballades, flawless terza rima, comically polysyllabicexact rhyme….” The poet has published only one free-verse (lack-ing rhyme and regular meter) poem in his life.

Yet Wilbur declares that he has no interest at all in form per se(“In the dictionary, formalist isn’t far from formaldehyde”) or in po-etic craft for its own sake. “The kind of poetry I like best, and tryto write, uses the whole instrument,” he says. “Meter, rhyme, mu-sical expression—and everything is done for the sake of what’s

being said, not for the sake of pret-tiness.” At the same time, he be-lieves that “For anyone who knowshow to use these forms powerfully,they make for a stronger kind ofpoetry than free verse can ever be.”

“All these traditional means areways of being rhythmically clear,”he explains: “making the emphasesstrong, making it clear what wordsare important. Rhyme is not justmaking a jingling noise, but tellingwhat words deserve emphasis.Meter, too, tells what the rhythm ofthought is. It doesn’t necessarilysound like music, but it has thestrength of sound underlyingeverything being said. I encouragemy students to memorize poems. Ifa poem is good, it is well to say itagain and again in your mind untilyou’ve found all the intended tonesand emphases.” He adds, “One ofthe great fascinations of poetry isthat you’re going almost naked: theequipment is so small, just lan-guage.”

Today, Wilbur is one of the fewactive major poets writing rhymedverse in English; “Rhyming,” he as-serts, “will never go away.” Brahamquotes him on the subject: “RobertFrost had a wonderful way ofputting it. He said, ‘Bad poetsrhyme words; good poets rhymephrases.’ That’s central to my wayof composing a poem. I want therhyme to happen inevitably, as apart of the flow of the argument—not as a way of completing an arbi-trary pattern. That latter thing isjust ornamentation, doily-making.”

Daniel Aaron observes that his“sense of form and control carriesout the tradition of English lyricpoetry. Dick’s poems will last;they have finish, humor, detach-ment, coolness, elegance, precision.There’s always something heldback. The

Harvard Magazine 41

(please turn to page 93)

Blackberries for AmeliaFringing the woods, the stone walls, and the lanes,Old thickets everywhere have come alive,Their new leaves reaching out in fans of fiveFrom tangles overarched by this year’s canes.

They have their flowers too, it being June,And here or there in brambled dark-and-lightAre small, five-petaled blooms of chalky white,As random-clustered and as loosely strewn

As the far stars, of which we now are toldThat ever faster do they blot away,And that a night may come in which, some say,We shall have only blackness to behold.

I have no time for any change so great,But I shall see the August weather spurBerries to ripen where the flowers were–Dark berries, savage-sweet and worth the wait–

And there will come the moment to be quickAnd save some from the birds, and I shall needTwo pails, old clothes in which to stain and bleed,And a grandchild to talk with while we pick.

A Measuring WormThis yellow striped greenCaterpillar, climbing upThe steep window screen,

Constantly (for lackOf a full set of legs) keepsHumping up his back.

It’s as if he sentBy a sort of semaphoreDark omegas meant

To warn of Last Things.Although he doesn’t know it,He will soon have wings,

And I, too, don’t knowToward what undreamt conditionInch by inch I go.

“BLACKBERRIES FOR AMELIA”: COPYRIGHT © RICHARD WILBUR. REPRINTED FROM COLLECTED POEMS, 1943-2004 (HARCOURT). ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED WITH PERMISSION.“A MEASURING WORM”: COPYRIGHT © 2008 RICHARD WILBUR. REPRINTED FROM THE NEW YORKER (FEBRUARY 11, 2008). ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED WITH PERMISSION.

excess and abandon of postmodern writ-ers exposes them to a lot of messy writ-ing. His verse is never heavy and neverbristles with obscurity. Dick was veryinfluenced by Robert Frost; there’s al-ways order, discipline, form. He sets upthese hazards, as it were; in the end, thestructure comes down, and there’s thepoem.”

Vision is the dominant sense in poetry,says Wilbur. “My father was a painter,”he notes. “I grew up in a world of paintingand always thought in a painterly way.”(He has illustrated some of the books hehas written for children.) His poems typi-cally germinate with the sight of “someinteresting object out in the world—forexample, just how a flycatcher flies, itsway of moving its wings. Once you’veseen this interesting thing, you have tofind the words for it, and once you’vemade it satisfactorily vivid to yourself,you find it has an ideal dimension—it isrelated to some ideas taking form in theback of your mind.” In a 1966 essay, “On

My Own Work,” he wrote, “What poetrydoes with ideas is to redeem them fromabstraction and submerge them in sensi-bility.”

“I’m a slow thinker and do almosteverything slowly,” says Wilbur, “exceptserve in tennis.” He believes that “veryfew really good poems are written with-out a lot of thought and a lot of revision—I advise my students to be terribly fussy.”In practice, though, he doesn’t exactly fol-low his own counsel. “I don’t revise verymuch,” he confesses. “What I do is waitand wait in a state of paralysis for theright thing to come to me. Most writersare not as hopelessly patient as I am. Idon’t mind sitting in a chair waiting forthe right word to come. Most peoplearen’t willing to put in as much chair timeas I am. I talked with Dylan Thomas andfound that we had very much the sameway of proceeding. He worked very, veryslowly, though the poem might come outsounding breezy. Each morning, he’dwrite out what he had done the day be-fore on a fresh sheet of paper, hoping thatit would give him the impetus to write aline or two more.”

Similarly, “As a translator,” Wilbur re-ports, “I always felt that if I got six oreight lines, that was a good day. I spendso much time on each line trying to getthe meaning and tone exact that I don’tthink my translations will die as soon assome others.”

The same could be said of his poetry,which shines with the basic trust in natureand in life that are lodestars for the poet.“Emerson said, ‘The deeper we go into our-selves, the more we are everybody,’” he ex-plains. “I think I write poetry on that un-derstanding. If I get deep within myself, Ican speak about everybody else. That’s mysupposition, at any rate.”

In some ways, Wilbur is a modern Tran-scendentalist, who shares with Emersonan attraction to poetry, ideas, religion,performance, and teaching, as well as aHarvard degree. This fall, he returns toAmherst, 66 years after graduating, toteach poetry one day a week. “I’m ner-vous,” he says, “about going back to classagain.”

Craig A. Lambert ’69, Ph.D. ’78, is deputy editor ofthis magazine.

Harvard Magazine 93

POETIC PATRIARCH(continued from page 41)

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