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R. W.
FLINT
This description of a firetruck is offered with a grin, but offered
nevertheless. Wilbur's ironies, when not whimsical, are likely to
be
ferocious, as in his early "To an American Poet Just Dead." Wilbur is
essentially a Broad Church, Wordsworthian poet and Americans
in
general are not much given to either irony, elegance or pomp as a
regular thing. I suspect his appeal derives as much from his ability to
undermine his Latin kingdom of the mind as from his skill in con–
juring it up. He does so deliberately, in spells of boyish or manly down–
rightness, in fits of the plain Nordic hoo-has (pessimism), but also
Wl–
consciously, by a certain cautionary imbalance between the mightiness
of his conclusions and the sinuous slightness of his forms.
Caveat lector,
say many of his poems, if you take me at face value,
tant pis pour vous.
Self-consciousness takes its toll, and I confess to liking the earlier
poetry of
Ceremony
better than the no less accomplished poems of
Advice to a Prophet,
a small collection in any case, thirty-one poems of
which seven are translations. In
Ceremony
he seemed to reach the climax
of his inner struggle between domesticity and the intoxication of pure
experience, the perilous attraction, in a world gone suburban, of qualities,
energies, immensities and solitudes just off the main line-in a Wellfleet
house, a piece of driftwood, a Renaissance palace. This produced a
vital oscillation between the long and short views, between the beauty
of patient survival and a surrender to sensation. The beauty of strange–
ness was not looked for or evoked; it was
there,
fitfully, in the language,
offsetting the occasional banality of the "message."
Advice to a Prophet
shows an advance in domestication as well as
a growing tendency, like Lowell's, to draw his themes from other poets.
"To Ishtar" and "She" follow in Graves's footsteps, "Loves of the
Puppets" is straight Ransom-on-the-rocks, "Junk" is amusing neo-Saxon
in a vein well exploited by Pound and Auden. Other poems bear down
in elegant but also somewhat schoolmasterly fashion on vampires,
faineants,
Laodiceans, the slackers and fakers of this imperfect world.
This mellowing of a poet with Wilbur's capacity for contempt re–
minds one of the same phenomenon in E. A. Robinson. I must say I
regret it. But having made these objections I have no more. Wilbur is
still very much a poet to be savored-and reckoned with.
R. W. Flint
