The Civil Tongue of Richard Wilbur

Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur: A Biographical Study
by Robert Bagg & Mary Bagg
University of Massachusetts Press, 2017, 392 pages, US$32.95
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You, whoever you are,
If you want to walk with me you must step lively.
—“Running”

 

What is an individual thing?
—“An Event”

 

Once, sitting next to Richard Wilbur in a Colorado restaurant and waiting for our drinks to arrive, I passed him a plate of hors d’oeuvres. “Try the wild boar sausage,” I said. “It’s a specialty.” Tall, serene, and as nearly regal as an American poet could possibly appear, he cast a mock-jaundiced look in my direction: “Are you trying to tell me something?” It was typical of Dick to have known, typical of me to have been ignorant of the fact, that the surname Wilbur descends from the Anglo-Saxon for wild boar. Count on him to have studied the etymology, even to have made use of it in at least one poem, “Looking into History”:

 

Now, old man of the sea,

I start to understand:

The will will find no stillness

Back in a stilled land.

 

The dead give no command

And shall not find their voice

Till they be mustered by

Some present fatal choice.

 

Let me now rejoice

In all impostures, take

The shape of lion or leopard,

Boar, or watery snake,

 

Or like the comber break,

Yet in the end stand fast

And by some fervent fraud

Father the waiting past,

 

Resembling at the last

The self-established tree

That draws all waters toward

Its live formality.

 

The shapes taken by living and dead things, and things half-perceived and imagined, were always of interest to him. A metaphysical poet, he was, like Donne and others, immersed in the physical world with dignity and live formality. A sort of Christian transcendentalist, he saw nature as a symbol of spirit, life as a dazzling field of signs we must read with sceptical gusto. Love was the prime mover in his universe because he had known its opposite in war, and he had known more personal suffering than he was willing to reveal in his exacting, polished and beautiful poems. He had also known a goodly portion of earthly love, and rightly counted himself lucky.

 

Richard Wilbur died last October at the age of ninety-six, having survived his beloved wife, Charlee, by a decade. To some of us at least, his death left American poetry a much-diminished thing. Along with my teacher Anthony Hecht, Wilbur was one of the best American poets who had served in the Second World War. In both men I sensed that their relative reserve, good manners and formal elegance came partly in compensation for certain horrors life had presented to them. Both men were highly accomplished but unpretentious. Both had good bullshit detectors, as you can see in this list Wilbur composed in an exhausted pique after a discouraging spate of theatre business:

 

Horse Shit

Fuck the following:

Musical theatre.

The public.

Collaboration.

Sweet reasonableness.

“The filtering-down of the best ideas to the great mass.” Matthew Arnold

Entertainment industry.

Plot. Story.

“Adaptation” of classics.

Revisions.

Concessions.

Enthralling forward movement and breathtaking timing. Brilliance.

Fear of dullness. Of point.

Money. Gorgeousness.

“Theatre.”

 

Another of our contemporaries would have published the list, called it a poem and won a prize for it. Wilbur kept it to himself. I quote it here because it comes from the man I knew, a man who could enjoy a good joke, and whose whole being was antithetical to self-importance.

The list can be found in Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur: A Biographical Study by Robert and Mary Bagg. Less a full-fledged biography than a work of biographical criticism, the book eschews most intimacy and evocation, hewing close to career highlights and readings of Wilbur’s poems and translations. But it does offer several nuanced revelations that will contribute to fresh readings of the work.

Some of these revelations concern Wilbur’s long marriage. By the time I met her nearly two decades ago, Charlee had already endured several illnesses and injuries that might have killed her but for an indefatigable inner force. She was strong, funny, beautiful, sometimes racy in her humour. I took the Wilburs on a picnic in the Colorado mountains, where we were visited by a flock of wild turkeys. The grey jays, sometimes called Whiskey Jacks or Camp Robbers, ate grapes out of our hands as we dined on cold chicken and wine. Charlee was thrilled. She placed grapes on her head and let the birds pluck them out of her hair, even from between her front teeth, and laughed raucously through it all. Ever the naturalist, Dick was curious to know the names of the trees around us, so different from his New England woods. They were people of real soul and engagement, worldly in the best sense, individuals rather than followers.

Once, on hearing that I was depressed, Charlee wrote me a letter saying she understood what I was going through, and she had been through it herself. She wanted to assure me that I’d pull through it and that the joy of life would return. Even sex would return, she said with typical frankness.

I mention these details because Richard Wilbur has so often been misread as a poet somehow “above” real life—the handsome tennis player who made Robert Frost jealous and made Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell so restrained in their praise. In addition to harsh combat experience, he had known depression, the mental illness of several family members, including his brother and his own youngest son, and a brief struggle with addiction to prescription medications. His life was not all the easy Parnassian ascent his detractors sometimes took it for.

 

Wilbur was a poet of the body as much as the soul, as you can see in “A Shallot”:

 

The full cloves

Of your buttocks, the convex

Curve of your belly, the curved

Cleft of your sex—

 

Out of this corm

That’s planted in strong thighs

The slender stem and radiant

Flower rise.

 

Critics may go wild finding the clitoral in Emily Dickinson, but they hardly have to try in Wilbur, for whom life and passion are as radiant and natural as that flower. Where so many modern poets practise versions of the egotistical mundane, Wilbur displaces himself and honours creation, as in his quatrain titled “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.

 

The clichéd negativity and anti-nature in so much contemporary poetry, the put-upon poet stewing in self-pity, were about as far from his vision as anything I can imagine.

A marriage of more than sixty years to a woman as strong as Charlee would certainly have kept Dick’s feet on the ground, except when they were in bed. The Baggs reproduce a photo of the couple at their wedding in 1942 (not long before he would ship out with the Army). Dick looks like a kid, younger than his twenty-one years, while Charlee seems fully a grown woman, someone to reckon with. They forged a partnership in which she was a necessary critic of his writing as well as a direct line to life. Partly from reading poems like “For C”, which contrasts their marriage to more adulterous relationships, I’ve always thought them a model of domestic unity:

 

We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse

And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share

The frequent vistas of their large despair,

Where love and all are swept to nothingness;

Still, there’s a certain scope in that long love

Which constant spirits are the keepers of,

 

And which, though taken to be tame and staid,

Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,

A passion joined to courtesy and art

Which has the quality of something made,

Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent,

Like a rose window or the firmament.

 

But their constancy, though real, was challenged not only by the troubles I mentioned earlier. Charlee was remarkably forthright about sex, and understood the temptations her young husband would experience while overseas in war. The Baggs write, “To his mother and father, Charlee had even explained honestly … that she understood her husband’s need for ‘comfort and companionship’ and ‘hoped he [was] having it.’” Readers of the war poems in Dick’s first book, The Beautiful Changes (1947), have probably wondered at some lines in “Place Pigalle”:

 

The soldiers come, the boys with ancient faces,

Seeking their ancient friends, who stroll and loll

Amid the glares and glass: electric graces.

 

The poem with its animal-sounding title notices one couple in particular:

 

She on the table, he in a tilting chair

With Arden ease; her eyes as pale as air

Travel his priestgoat face; his hand’s thick tines

Touch the gold whorls of her Corinthian hair.

 

Wilbur was the son of a painter, and one can almost see the brushstrokes conveying these grotesques (one also remembers that St Paul found Corinth a den of iniquity). The Baggs tell us that Wilbur carelessly included a photo of himself with “a pretty French girl” in a packet sent to his wife. Then he panicked, making sure to order her some expensive perfume as well. Charlee’s letter in response is the perfect example of her extraordinary spiritedness:

 

You’re a dolt! Did you really think you had to “forewarn” me about that picture of you and that sexy-looking French frail? Even if I saw a picture of you actually in bed with such a babe, I shouldn’t think any other thought than—“god, I’d like to be in her shoes!” (Or out of them, as the case might be.) You must remember that I have tremendous respect for your essential taste. And I also have great faith in and dependence upon our common love so that whatever you did couldn’t possibly touch the line of goodth that ties us irrevocably together.

 

If Charlee is the most fully realised character in Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur, it’s because she was the most fully realised character in their marriage. The surest signs of Dick’s character are to be found transmuted in his poems.

 

John Ashbery once criticised the painter Thomas Hart Benton for “accepting the acceptable”, and similar charges have often been levelled against Wilbur’s poetry, as if it were merely conventional. The charges are unfair and untrue. His best poems challenge and reward our readings, never remaining inert. In an essay called “The Bottles Become New, Too”, written for a famous Bard College gathering of then-contemporary poets, Wilbur not only defended the adaptability of received forms, but defined his art’s dynamism: “No poetry can have strength unless it continually bashes itself against the reality of things.” On another occasion, Robert Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop that Wilbur was too enamoured of things, or surfaces. But the things of this world were, to Wilbur, mysteries and messages—not so much the gimcrack objects he despaired of in “Junk”, but the essential tools and objects of fully-lived-in existence.

There is a quiet urgency underlying his perfectionism and refusal to accept despair as the only reliable human mood. In his poem “The Beautiful Changes” we understand changes to be a verb: “The beautiful changes as a forest is changed / By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it …” An allusion to Keats’s “cameleon poet” grows synaesthetic in that “tuning” skin. But seeing the title for the first time on the spine of the book, I took changes for a noun. In Wilbur’s poetry, the mutability and wonder of words match the mutability and wonder of life.

The same volume begins with “Cicadas” and “Water Walker”, presenting us with a naturalist’s sensibility as observant as Elizabeth Bishop’s or Marianne Moore’s. All of which makes the terse ironies of his war poems even more striking. Here is “On the Eyes of an SS Officer”:

 

I think of Amundsen, enormously bit

By arch-dark flurries on the ice plateaus,

An amorist of violent virgin snows

And the cold end of the world’s spit.

 

Or a Bombay saint asquat in the market place,

Eyes gone from staring the sun over the sky,

Who still dead-reckons that acetylene eye,

An eclipsed mind in a blind face.

 

But this one’s iced or ashen eyes devise,

Foul purities, in flesh their wilderness,

Their fire; I ask my makeshift God of this

My opulent bric-a-brac earth to damn his eyes.

 

Stevens once criticised Frost for writing about things, and Frost retorted that Stevens wrote about bric-a-brac. The “opulent bric-a-brac” here seems a matter of life and death. Look at Wilbur’s precise ambiguity in phrases like “the world’s spit”, “that acetylene eye” and “my makeshift God”. “This” rhymes with “wilderness”—a land of menace in which art is a brace against evil. Critics who think Wilbur is not engagé should have their heads examined.

Some of the Baggs’ best chapters deal with Wilbur’s war experience, which was intense, including the bloody battle at Monte Cassino. He served with the 36th Texas Division, where he became educated in manners rougher than his own. A young writer with leftist sympathies, Wilbur sought duty as a cryptographer in the Signal Company. The Baggs recount his interview for the post with a captain:

 

“I see you’re fully qualified in cryptography and radio operation.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It also says here that you want to overthrow the government. Well, do you want to overthrow the government, Private Wilbur?”

“No, sir.”

“Then I want you to join our message center. But if we catch you overthrowing our government, out you go.”

 

Wilbur had written poetry as a student at Amherst, and kept writing through the war—including some fiction and plenty of journalism for military papers. Poems including “Tywater”, about the death of a fellow soldier, “First Snow in Alsace” and “Mined Country”, leave impressions of dark absurdity. Combat experience also haunts later poems like “Terza Rima” and “This Pleasing Anxious Being”.

After the war he pursued graduate studies at Harvard, then an academic career at Amherst and Wesleyan University, while he and Charlee raised their family. It was a time in which an old boys’ network helped make a career, and while women writers like Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Bishop were also recognised, the tight friendships and rivalries among men dominated the scene. Wilbur won prizes and fellowships that made much of his working life possible, though it also inspired jealousy from fellow poets, including John Berryman.

When a Guggenheim Fellowship gave him a chance to try writing a play, Wilbur confirmed a suspicion that his talent was primarily lyric, not dramatic, and turned instead to his justly celebrated translations of Moliere and Racine, work that gave him experience of theatre business and backstage machinations, but also made him enough money eventually to retire from full-time teaching. The chapters on Wilbur’s life in the theatre are animated by characters like Lillian Hellman and Leonard Bernstein, with whom Wilbur worked on the unsuccessful Broadway production of Candide.

His lyric poetry was Frostian in some of its phrasings and settings, but more clearly metaphysical in its underlying sensibility. And after the first two books, each of Wilbur’s collections, from Things of this World (1956) to Mayflies (2000) and the slender Anterooms (2010), would contain a goodly portion of his superb and fluent translations, not only from the French, which he knew well (and Charlee apparently knew better), but also from Russian and Spanish. His versions of Villon, Borges, Baudelaire, Brodsky, Akhmatova and Voznesensky allowed him to explore a broader range of sensibilities than his own. “Long live Antiworlds!” he exclaims in a translation of Voznesensky. “They rebut / With dreams the rat-race and the rut.”

 

No matter how burnished Wilbur’s surfaces, he never lost a sense of life’s anarchic energies—critics have rarely credited him for a wild vitality obliquely visible between his lines. His best poems are always alive to what cannot be said, just as his perfect rhymes and ore-loaded diction convey the limits of language. This charming quality is most obviously on display in children’s books, such as The Disappearing Alphabet:

 

Because they’re always BUZZING, honey bees

Could not be with us if there were no Z’s,

And many Z’s are needed, furthermore,

When people feel the need to SNOOZE and snore.

Long live the Z, then! Not for any money,

Would I give up such things as sleep and honey.

 

He knew the importance of play. I wouldn’t be the first to quote his late poem “Hamlin Brook” and say that Wilbur was a poet who had learned “Joy’s trick”, but the very phrase— the word trick—suggests how easily the world can fool us.

In the post-war decades, American poets were considered brave for their darkest personal revelations. Wilbur was different. As the Baggs put it, he “chose not to make his family’s suffering … a subject for his poetry”. It’s possible to see bravery in this anti-narcissistic stance as well. Unlike Robert Lowell, he didn’t set himself up as a spokesman for moral certitude. He opposed the Vietnam War, but he also felt the smugness of the opposition in the academy. The Baggs quote a 2007 interview in which he stated, “The people who had it easiest during the Vietnam War were our students, and they took the occasion in the name of protest to indulge themselves in every possible way.” When after the Kent State shootings in 1970 he offered his poem “For the Student Strikers” to the Wesleyan Strike News, their first response was to throw it in the waste basket. Someone retrieved and published it, though, and I still find it a significant document of the times, capable of speaking to our own:

 

Go talk with those who are rumored to be unlike you,

And whom, it is said, you are so unlike.

Stand on the stoops of their houses and tell them why

You are out on strike.

 

It is not yet time for the rock, the bullet, the blunt

Slogan that fuddles the mind toward force.

Let the new sound in our streets be the patient sound

Of your discourse.

 

Doors will be shut in your faces, I do not doubt.

Yet here or there, it may be, there will start,

Much as the lights blink on in a block at evening,

Changes of heart.

 

They are your houses; the people are not unlike you;

Talk with them, then, and let it be done

Even for the grey wife of your nightmare sheriff

And the guardsman’s son.

 

In the age of Trump, I am not so level-headed as Wilbur; I see the necessity for outrage and resistance. But Wilbur’s poem remains a corrective, a voice of reason in violent times.

It’s this honourable stance in man and poet, together with his beautifully charged lines, that I most admire in Wilbur. His controversial poem about Sylvia Plath, “Cottage Street, 1953”, has been read as too critical of the younger poet in a time of emotional distress. Bishop thought Wilbur smug when he wrote, “It is my office to exemplify / The published poet in his happiness …” But these lines are ironic. He knows very well that he is helpless before the suicidal despair of another person:

 

I am a stupid life-guard who has found,

Swept to his shallows by the tide, a girl

Who, far from shore, has been immensely drowned …

 

If anything, Plath’s struggle is contrasted to Wilbur’s apprehension of his own shallowness. His poem grapples honestly with the literary culture of his time as well as the suffering of another person.

 

Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur is a book with an odd title and a too hasty resume of its subject’s life, but it’s a beginning, and future biographers will be glad to have more good material between covers. The Baggs must have wondered how far to carry their personal knowledge of their subject, and I can understand the problem. Trying to conclude these impressions, I can hardly prevent a eulogistic tone from flooding my prose. There are also many poems I wish I could take time to discuss, including “This Pleasing Anxious Being”, “The Ride”, “The Writer”, “Piccola Commedia”, “The Mind-Reader”, “Advice to a Prophet”, “Love Calls Us to the Things of this World”, “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra”, “The Pardon”, and “Juggler”. I am moved by the casual mastery in a poem like “An Event”:

 

As if a cast of grain leapt back to the hand,

A landscape full of small black birds, intent

On the far south, convene at some command

At once in the middle of the air, at once are gone

With headlong and unanimous consent

From the pale trees and fields they settled on.

 

That cinematic opening, like running a film backwards, conveying what appears to be a flock of starlings taking off, is typical of Wilbur’s fresh perceptions. The second stanza begins, “What is an individual thing? They roll / Like a drunken fingerprint across the sky!” And there it is—what Louis MacNeice called “The drunkenness of things being various”—the variety and mystery and identities of the world. What, indeed, is any individual thing? Wilbur’s poetry is an effort to see even through the drunkenness of dream.

When W.H. Auden died, Dick produced a perfect elegy, surveying some of what he had seen in life and tying it to the passing of another poet:

 

Now I am surer where they were going,

The brakie loping the tops of the moving freight,

The beautiful girls in their outboard, waving to   someone

As the stern dug in and the wake pleated the water,

 

The uniformed children led by a nun

Through the ’s uproar, the clew-drawn   scholar descending

The cast-iron stair of the stacks, shuffling his papers,

The Indians, two to a blanket, passing in darkness,

 

Also the German prisoner switching

His dusty neck as the truck backfired and started—

Of all these noted in stride and detained in memory

I now know better that they were going to die,

 

Since you, who sustained the civil tongue

In a scattering time, and were a poet of all our cities,

Have for all your clever difference quietly left us,

As we might have known you would, by that common door.

 

The last postcard I received from Dick is dated 17 March 2015—just after his ninety-fourth birthday, for which I must have sent him good tidings. The hand has unravelled from its former neatness. “As for me,” he writes, “I am an idle old widower waiting for a last poem to suggest itself. Many good wishes to you and your busy pen.” The kindness and self-deprecation speak volumes.