Richard Wilbur

This comprehensive collection presents new and never published poems by Richard Wilbur, author of 17 poetry collections, four children's books, and numerous works in prose and translations.

Collected Poems 1943-2004

Bryce Taylor

Not a review exactly, but here is my TOP TEN LIST for Richard Wilbur’s poems (missing periods may be attributed to this post’s origins in a Twitter thread):

10—The Writer: a narrative poem reminding us that for all his facility with form & metaphor, Wilbur saw writing as a matter of life & death. A rare glimpse, too, of the poet as a father

9—The House: a widower to his late wife. Published in old age, it may be Wilbur’s most tender poem. If his “development” is a gradual move toward greater clarity & simplicity, this is a culmination. A suggestion in the “widow’s walk” that his wife’s the one now truly alive
 
8—Lying: I tire of writers describing fiction as “lying,” but Wilbur gets a pass here. If I had to make a case for the importance (and maybe the truth?) of metaphor, I would start with this poem

7—In Limbo: a stirring meditation on time, identity, memory—and really everything. Like “Love Calls Us…” it’s set in that twilight state between dream & waking, and so (I think) can sneak past the reader’s waking logical brain into that half-dreaming sweet spot

6—Seed Leaves: an “Homage to R.F.” this poems borrows several elements from Robert Frost. It confronts the tragedy of choice—to choose one path is to lose others. Greatness comes not by being all, but by growing as the particular thing you are. Reach heaven by going deep in earth

5—October Maples, Portland: an inspired lyric, and one of Wilbur’s most explicitly religious. He finds timeless, edenic beauty in the brief brilliance of autumn leaves. But his epiphany isn’t solitary—it’s social, communal, like the tongues of Pentecost

4—A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra: Wilbur described his career as a quarrel with Poe’s aesthetic escapism. Like Frost in “Birches,” Wilbur sees earth as the place for love. His loving attention to the fountain enacts the kind of this-worldly spirituality he espouses

3—For C: a poem for Charlee, Wilbur’s wife. I sense “Dover Beach” in the background (key words appear in both poems). Where love for Arnold is a refuge from a loveless world, Wilbur finds love to be like the world: “something made.” The poem can also be read as an ars poetica

2—The Beautiful Changes: an early lyric, a masterclass in poetic technique. But one feels in this brief poem the weight & mystery of something beyond technique. Wilbur’s perennial concerns—change, metaphor, the beauty of creation—are here condensed & woven brilliantly together

1—Love Calls Us to the Things of This World: electric. Includes at least three of the best single lines you’re likely to read anywhere. Wilbur’s chief concern—the tension between a pull toward transcendence & love for the lowly “things of this world”—is held in perfect balance

Honorable Mentions:

“A World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness”
Looking into History
She
Hamlen Brook
Icons
Mayflies
The Reader

Under-appreciated Gems:

Elsewhere
Fern-Beds in Hampshire County
In the Field
The Sirens

Collected Poems 1943-2004

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