BOOKS
155
call what our convictions are and (harder still) to see how they might relate
to what we say and do. Ou r century is sown with instances of those doctri–
nally convinced of dogmas like class or racial extermination who yet behave
benevolently in their private lives. That is an uncomfortable truth, however
you look at it. But life gets even more uncomfortable and, what is worse,
more delusory, if you do not look at it at all.
GEORGE WATSON
WILBUR'S GIFTS
NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS.
By
Richard Wilbur.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $27.95.
Because a dozen years have passed since Richard Wilbur's last
book of poems, a reader's attention will naturally be drawn first to the new
work here. Given pride of place in this collection, it is a now familiar blend of
Wilbur's gifts for elegant lyricism, intellectual poise, and moral sympathy.
What other poet since Frost or MacLeish could bring off such a convincing
public poem - full-throated and vividly detailed oratory sustained by a canny
historical imagination - as his "On Freedom's Ground," the text for William
Schuman's cantata to honor the Statue of Liberty? And no poet sinceJ.V.
Cunningham could have contrived so gracefully devastating an epigram as
Wilbur's "On Having Mis-Identified a Wild Flower:"
A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.
There are dreams and riddles here, satires and nature studies, a few
expert translations, a poignant elegy for Auden, even a grandly clever poem
about those words
(edile, esker, ranee, Elia
and their ilk) that appear only in
crossword puzzles.
But best of all is "Lying," an 85-line meditation that opens with the
same deceptive casualness it describes: ''To claim, at a dead party, to have
spotted a grackle, / When in fact you haven't oHate, can do no harm." From
there the poet goes on, through anecdote and allusion, through
all
manner of
lies, on to "the great lies told with the eyes half-shut / That have the truth in
view," Since all things are somewhere, somehow true, there are strictly
