A History of American Literature

548 The American Century: Literature since 1945

“The bomb speaks,” said William Carlos Williams in one of his last poems,

“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” “... the bomb has entered our lives / to destroy us.”

Against the “mere picture of the exploding bomb,” he set the powers of love and the

imagination which, he said, were “of a piece” since they both required a dedication to

life, its beauties and possibilities. This is a theme on which James Merrill plays his own

variations in his trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), where he tells us of

conjured spirits who inform him, “NO SOULS CAME FROM HIROSHIMA U

KNOW.” Merrill, in effect, uses prophecy and magic to release his vision. The spirits

he has met, he says, are “HOPING AGAINST HOPE THAT MAN WILL LOVE HIS

MIND & HIS LANGUAGE”; if man does not, then the “WORLD WILL BE UNDONE”

and “HEAVEN ITSELF” will “TURN TO ONE GRINNING SKULL.” If Merrill claims

that he has become a medium for absolute truth, in order to voice his sense of the

potential for mass destruction – and the redeeming power of love and language –

then Sylvia Plath adopts similarly vatic tones in a poem like “Nick and the Candlestick.”

Here, the poet sets her fear of “the incalculable effects of nuclear fallout” against her

care for her as yet unborn child. “Let the stars / Plummet to their dark address,”

she declares: “You are the one / Solid the spaces lean on, envious. / You are the baby in

the barn.” Lines like these illustrate, again, how the poetry of the personal can become

the poetry of prophecy. Universal annihilation and individual fertility are placed side

by side: the poem is about both history and the body, the bomb and the womb, and

manages to be at once oracular and intimate. In a very different sense, some of this is

also true of a formalist piece on the nuclear threat, “Advice to a Prophet” by Richard

Wilbur. Wilbur adopts the modest pose of advising rather than being the prophet, but

the result is, in its own way, just as resonant – and just as personal. “When you come ...

to the streets of our city,” Wilbur advises, “Speak of the world’s own change.” “We could

believe,” he goes on, “If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip / Into perfect

shade, grown perfectly shy, / That lark avoid the reaches of our eye ...” The beautiful

objects of this world will be lost, Wilbur intimates, which means, too, the loss of our-

selves. Unable to see or speak them, we shall also be unable to see and speak our own

being; we, and our words, will “slip / Into perfect shade.” “Ask us, ask us,” Wilbur

repeats through the poem, “Ask us, prophet, how we shall call / Our natures forth

when that live tongue is all / Dispelled.” Formalists and confessionals alike retain their

belief in the power of speech – the language that summons us to knowledge of our

lives – even in the face of absolute silence.

The uses of formalism

There are many ways of being a formalist poet. One way is illustrated by the subtle,

serious wit of Richard Wilbur, another by the passionate, metaphysical sensibility of

Stanley Kunitz (1905–2006), as his Collected Poems (2000) illustrates. In a poem like

“Foreign Affairs,” for instance, Kunitz develops the conceit of lovers as “two countries

girded for war” to examine the intricacies and erotic heat of a relationship. The poem

is at once cerebral and sensuous, turning what could have been little more that an

intellectual tour de force into a sensitive analysis of the way “fated and contagious

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