Randall Jarrell
A VIEW OF THREE POETS
Richard Wilbur is a delicate, charming, and skillful poet–
his poems not only make you use, but make you eager to use, words
like
attractive
and
appealing
and
engaging.
His poems are often gay
and often elegiac-almost professionally elegiac, sometimes; funny or
witty; individual; beautiful or at least pretty; accomplished in their
rhymes and rhythms and language. Somebody said about Christopher
Fry-and almost anybody must have felt it_eel don't think real poetry
is ever as
poetic
as this." One feels this way about some of Mr. Wilbur's
language (and about some of what he sayi, too; what poets say is
often just part of their language); but generally his language has a
slight incongruity or "offness," a skillful use of verbs and kinesthetic
words, a relishable relishing texture, a sugar-coated-slap-in-the-face
rhetoric, that produce a real though rather mild pleasure. The reader
notices that the poet never gets so lost either in his subject or in his
emotions that he forgets
to
mix in his usual judicious proportion of all
these things; his manners and manner never fail.
Mr. Wilbur seems to be a naturally lyric or descriptive poet. His
book
1
is rather like a picture gallery-he often mentions painters-and
his people are usually not much more than portions of landscapes or
still-lifes. The poems are all Scenes, none of them dramatic; and if
the reader is someone who feels that you can't look at the best sunset for
more than a few minutes (but that people sometimes last for centuries),
he is sure to start longing for a murder or a Character-after thirty or
forty pages he would pay dollars for one dramatic monologue, some
blessed graceless human voice that has not yet learned to express itself
so composedly as poets do.
When you read "The Death of a Toad," a poem that begins
A
toad the power mower caught,! Chewed and clipped
of
a leg, with
a hobbling hop has got/ To the garden verge,
you stop to shudder at
the raw being of the world, at all that
a hobbling hop
has brought to
life-that
toad is real, all right. But when you read on, when Mr. Wil–
bur says that the toad
dies/ Toward some deep monotone,/ Toward
misted and ebullient seas/ And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia's
emperies,
you think with a surge of irritation and dismay, "So it was
1.
Ceremony and Other Poems.
Harcourt, Brace.
$2.50.
