BOO KS
547
written, and admirably fitted to fill empty spaces between fiction and
feature articles. One might call it the
New York er
school of verse.
Though the offices of
The New Yorker
are in New York, its heart
is in the suburbs. The magazine is certainly the handbook of the suburban
matron throughout the country.
The New Yorker
publishes a quantity
of light verse, which is nothing to be ashamed of; but light verse
that lives beyond the moment is extremely rare. It is rare because poetic
wit itself is a rarity; what often passes for it is something "cute," some–
thing coy, something pleasant, harmless, or naughty-bitter.
It
should
be well-formed; and not-by the same poet-reiterated too frequently
in the same phrases. The cutting edge too frequently wears dull. Large
indiscriminate doses of it tend to cloy. These truisms are probably known
in the offices of
T he New York er
and regretted-therefore, it has fallen
back on publishing quasi-serious verse as well, constructed according to
current formulas: certain verse forms used with enough caution to
be recognized at once, certain images within the verSes that recall the
"happy-bitter" experience of childhood, the joy of collecting toys and
the discovery that toys are perishable, the country places visited at home,
the holiday from suburban security in Europe. The great discomfort in
reading too much
New Yorker
verse is that the formula continually
wears thin; it is not as cheering as it hoped to be- or as light and
witty as Sandy Wilson's parody of the 1920's in his musical
The Boy
Friend.
Reading too much
New Yorker
verse becomes a bore.
By these winding suburban roads I have come to Richard Wilbur's
third book of verse, with its well-chosen title,
Things of This World.
It
is a book that should utterly charm the
Zeitgeist.
It
is undoubtedly the
best of Wilbur's three books, and if his early reviewers have placed him
among the better poets of his immediate generation, they have not
been wrong. With the same care with which he has chosen his title he
has selected poems for this volume; they are not too many, not too
few; though he is in the
New Yorker
orbit he seems to float slightly
beyond it. What Wilbur contributes to the verse of the
Zeitgeist
is an
absolutely engaging personality with "the desire to please"1 between
the lines of every stanza. This is "the something new" that he has
offered to the
Zeitgeist.
Some of the recent poems reflect his travels in
1 I quote Alain from an essay on education. An apt expression of what
I mean is in Charles Churchill's lines on Lady Caroline H ervey :
That face, that form, that dignity, that ease,
Those powers of pleasing, with that will to please.
