THREE POETS
693
Most of his poetry consents too easily, with innocent complacence,
to its own unnecessary limitations. Once an unusually reflective half–
back told me that as a run develops there will sometimes be a moment
when you can "settle for six or eight yards, or else take a chance and get
stopped cold or, if you're lucky, go the whole way." Mr. Wilbur almost
always settles for six or eight yards; and so many reviewers have praised
him for this that in his second book he takes fewer risks than in his
first. (He is one of those Southern girls to whom everybody north of
Baltimore has said, "Whatever you do,
don't
lose that lovely Southern
accent of yours"; after a few years they sound like Amos and Andy.)
If
I were those reviewers I would quote to Mr. Wilbur something
queer and true that Blake said on the same subject: "You never know
what is enough unless you know what is more than enough." Mr. Wil–
bur never goes too far, but he never goes far enough. In the most serious
sense of the word he is not a very satisfactory poet. And yet he seems
the best of the quite young poets writing in this country, poets con–
siderably younger than Lowell and Bishop and Shapiro and Schwartz;
I want to finish by admiring his best poems, not by complaining about
their limitations. But I can't blame his readers if they say to him in
encouraging impatient voices: "Come on,
take a chance!"
If
you never
look
just
wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to
posterity--every writer has to be, to some extent, sometimes, . a law
unto himself.
Since Robert Lowell's
The Mills of the K avanaughs
2
consists of
only seven poems-one tremendously long, four quite sizeable-I can
treat them one by one. "The Fat Man in the Mirror" makes a better
impression on you if you haven't read the strange and beautiful Wedel
poem on which it is based; this "imitation after Werfel"-never was any–
thing less imitative!-is a baroque, febrile, Horowitz-Variations-on-the–
Stars-and-Stripes-Forever affair. Part I of "Her Dead Brother" is a
restrained, sinister, and extremely effective poem; the suicide-by-gas–
stove Part II is effective in some portions, but is mannered and
violent-Part I seems better off as the separate poem that it originally
was. It would be hard to write, read, or imagine a more nightmarish
poem than "Thanksgiving's Over"-on one level it is a complete suc–
cess, and it is almost with a sigh of relief that one concludes that it
does not succeed on another level, that all this is the possible with
which art does not have to deal, not the probable with which it must.
Still, it is a frightening and impressive-and in parts very moving-
2. Harcourt, Brace. $2.50.
