534 The American Century: Literature since 1945of birth, death, and renewal, departure and return, and it deals with them in terms
of allegory and parable, a vocabulary as old as the human race.
If the early poetry of Merwin reveals a characteristic feature of American poetry
at the beginning of the 1950s, then the work of Richard Wilbur (1921–) illustrates
analogous ones. “Most American poets of my generation,” Wilbur has said, “were
taught to admire the English Metaphysical poets ... and such contemporary masters
of irony as John Crowe Ransom.... Poetry could not be honest, we thought, unless
it began by acknowledging the full discordancy of modern life.... I still believe that
to be a true view of poetry.” For Wilbur, the appropriate way of acknowledging
discordancy in verse is to accommodate it within an elaborate formal structure. The
poet, he argues, has to convert “events” into “experiences,” and he does this through
a skillful application of form; the poet’s forms supply a context, while his ironic,
quizzical yet steady voice draws disparate elements together, relates them and holds
them in equilibrium. The precision, the sense of control supplied by a traditional
framework, is necessary, but so also is lightness of touch, wit, irony, and ambiguity,
so as to prevent a hardening of the poetic arteries – to preserve nuances of feeling,
the flash and play of this “maculate, cracked, askew / Gay-pocked and potsherd
world.” “The strength of the genie,” Wilbur declared, “comes of his being confined in
a bottle”; and, in saying this, he was speaking for many poets of his generation, with
their belief in “Beauty joined to energy,” the magical, liberating possibilities of form.
Poems are not addressed to anybody in particular,” Wilbur declared. “The poem ...
is a conflict with disorder, not a message from one person to another.” To make a
crude but serviceable distinction, he committed himself, early on in his career, to the
idea of the poem as object, rather than vehicle of communication, an object with its
own “strictness of form.” Having made that commitment, he has stuck to it, from
the early poems gathered in The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947), through
The Poems of Richard Wilbur (1963), to Collected Poems 1943–2004 (2004). Others of
roughly his generation have done so too; among them, Stanley Kunitz, Weldon Kees,
Reed Whittemore, Howard Nemerov, Anthony Hecht, Edgar Bowers, Donald Justice,
X. J. Kennedy – and above all, in her own inimitable way, Elizabeth Bishop. After
the early 1950s, however, many American poets actively rejected formalism and the
mythologizing tendency, and went in search of other gods, new ways of turning
the world into words. Some of those ways will be considered later. The main
one worth mentioning here is the movement toward autobiography: poetry became,
once again, not a flight from personality but a dramatization, a reinvention of the
personal. The first person, “I,” was restored to the center of the poem. Recovering
one of the major impulses, probably the major one, in the American tradition, poets
began placing themselves squarely at the center of the poem. The poet’s private self
became both subject and speaker, just as it had in “Song of Myself ”; the growth of
the poet’s mind informed the narrative or supplied whatever coherence there might
be; and the poet addressed the reader directly, with an often unnerving intimacy, as
if that reader were confessor, therapist, friend, or even lover. These lines, taken from
very different poems, illustrate the change – or, to be more exact, the rediscovery of
what Whitman meant when he said, “Who touches this book touches a man”:GGray_c05.indd 534ray_c 05 .indd 534 8 8/1/2011 7:31:29 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 29 PM