BOOKS
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is often a white goddess.
As
lover, mate, muse, or stranger, the beloved fe–
male figure haunts many of his poems. I am thinking of such poems as
"Complaint," "A Late Aubade," "She," "To lshtar," "Piazza di Spagna, Early
Morning," "Apology," and haifa dozen more. Wonder more than passion is
the note these poems sound. The woman in them is a luminous presence
against which so much masculine darkness or confllsion stands out. The tex–
tures of Wilbur's celebrations are everywhere luxuriant, and such sensuality
is
missing from most modern poetry.
But his desire is also embodied in landscape and in weather. Rural
epiphanies abound, and they serve the purposes both of observation and
private revelation. "The heart's wish for life" is over and over again pro–
jected onto New England scenes of volatile seasonal changes or surprising
urges from underground or overhead. A loneliness haunts these poems too.
Like Adam east of Eden, this poet is only "homelessly at home." He writes
with the understanding that love and beauty imply a separation. The de–
tached observer in a forest clearing, or the lover awakened by dawn - both
share the same ache:
And call that sorrow sweet
That teaches us
to
see
The final face
or
love
In what we cannot be.
Certain poems from Wilbur's early books were quickly anthologized
and became standards, as firmly implanted as some of Donne or Shelley.
Readers and writers of my generation cut their teeth on them, but later those
same models seemed
to
be a despised rallying point for opponents from ev–
ery new fashion to campaign against. Wilbur himself, above the fray and
perhaps fading from critical attention, seemed impervious
to
fashions,
whether Beat or confessional, expressionist or minimalist or demotic. But of
course his work did change and grow in authority, as is clear from reading
this big book. Through the years he consistently wrote in a style that flat–
tered the mind his poems celebrated - its powers and limits. But read today,
his early poems otten strike the ear as quaint. They are written in a rather
stagy dialect oftheir own, one that prefers "fane" to "grove, " or "espial" to
"sight." He clearly wanted a sort of "poetic diction" that would resist the or–
dinary and sacrifice neither clarity nor nuance. Yeats and Auden prompted
him, to be sure, but the example of two poets has been crucial to his work
from the start: Milton and Frost. He may not be temperamentally suitable,
but the sinuosity, the Latinate cast and lexical complexities ofWilbur's poems
owe much to Milton. Frost is the more obvious tutor. The newest poems in
