BOOKS
147
THE ROAD FROM ROME
ADVICE TO A PROPHET. By Richard Wilbur. Harcourt, Brace. $3.75.
Richard Wilbur is a sturdy Roman legionary of the arts, a
figure whose archaisms, compounded, become original in their energy,
charm and polish. For the good reader of leftish sympathies he ought
to be a secret vice, for there is nothing illiberal in his nature and his
best poems make one of the very few actively spacious worlds in modern
poetry. Nevertheless he offers some whacking paradoxes to criticism.
On the platform he looks like someone in a Civil War photograph, yet
elegance is the word most commonly used of his poetry. He revels in
sonorous Johnsonian epithets like " ... gulls colonial on the sullied ice"
or "The bronze annals of the oak tree ..." but the most affecting poem
in this book finds him peering domestically under the ripped-up floor–
boards of a room in his house, searching for
. . .
the buried strangeness
Which nourishes the known:
That spring from which the floor-lamp
Drinks now a wilder bloom,
Inflaming the damask love-seat
And the whole dangerous room.
Wilbur would be a less interesting poet
if
he were easier to come
by. I wish I could surrender to the temptation merely to assert, in good,
gruff New England tones, that Wilbur says all the good, true New
England things about Life, Humanity, Nature and the
lacrimae rerum
and says them with a skill that reflects credit on the whole humanist
enterprise of the Eastern seaboard. Much of Wilbur, indeed, stifles
criticism by swinging along a broad noonday highway of common feel–
ings and common ideas, followed by a baggage-wagon of loot from all
over the world. This is the colonizer and editorialist whose poems re–
view themselves as they progress, as much in careful silences and formal
sheernesses as in those muscular verbs, verbal adjectives and nouns that
hustle you past moments of doubt.
Shift at the corner into uproarious gear
And make it around the turn in a squall of traction,
The headlong bell maintaining sure and clear,
Thought
is
degraded action!
Beautiful, heavy, unweary, loud, obvious thing!
