forces at play during the 1950s steered religious
practice toward collective thinking and away
from individualism.
One of the most significant factors influenc-
ing American society during that decade was the
fear of Communism. After World War II ended
in 1945, the world was left with two major coun-
tries, or superpowers, with opposing social
orders. The Soviet Union had a Communist
social order, based roughly on the social princi-
ples first laid out by economist Karl Marx in his
bookThe Communist Manifesto, published in
- While Communism is basically an eco-
nomic theory, the Soviet empire was a totalitar-
ian state that controlled many aspects of daily
life, including religion. The Communist Party of
the Soviet Union officially supported atheism,
opposing belief in any God. American atheists
therefore were suspected of being sympathetic to
the Soviets at the least, and possibly even of
being active supporters of America’s Cold War
opponents. Americans who did not want to fall
under a cloud of suspicion were more likely to
participate in organized religion: membership in
a church or synagogue was the overwhelming
standard for religious life.
This tendency toward a socially recogniz-
able religious life was augmented in the 1950s
by the postwar advent of television. Almost as
soon as television became a popular consumer
commodity in the late 1940s, ministers realized
its usefulness as a way to reach nationwide con-
gregations. Bishop Fulton Sheen, of Rochester,
New York, is recognized as the first television
preacher with a national audience, with pro-
grams that started in 1951 and continued, in
various forms and on different networks,
through to the late 1960s. Other ministers fol-
lowed, expanding the homogenizing effect of
television, which brings one shared experience
to millions at a time, to religion.
It was within this context that Wilbur was
writing about angels and one person’s individ-
ual musings about them. While most of society
was moving toward a religious hierarchy, listen-
ing to the words of specialists about the exis-
tence and order of angels and how unknown
spirits affect daily life, Wilbur’s poem repre-
sents the unmediated experience of an individ-
ual trying to understand religious significance
in his own terms.
Critical Overview.
The poem ‘‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This
World’’ inspires the title of Richard Wilbur’s
1956 collectionThings of This World, which
was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the
National Book Award. This was the same year
that Wilbur became a familiar name among peo-
ple who do not read poetry, as his translation of
Voltaire’s comedyCandide, with music by Leo-
nard Bernstein, appeared on Broadway. Indeed,
Wilbur’s fame was lasting. In a 1996 survey by
Jed Rasula, ‘‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This
World’’ was found to be the most often anthol-
ogized American poem between 1940 and 1990.
The poet Marjorie Perloff, writing inPoetry
On & Off the Page, reports that the poem was
given serious examination in a discussion by
three poets in Anthony Ostroff’s 1964 work
The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic.In
the course of this discussion, Richard Eberhart
considers the most important thing about ‘‘Love
Calls Us to the Things of This World’’ to be the
way ‘‘it celebrates the immanence of spirit in
spite of the ‘punctual rape of every blessed`
day.’’’ May Swenson, in the same volume, con-
centrates on Wilbur’s balance of the physical
and spiritual, concluding that ‘‘the whole poem
...is in fact an epitome of relative weight and
equipoise,’’ or counterbalance. Perloff, who pro-
vides these quotes from Eberhart and Swenson,
has a more complicated view of the poem. Writ-
ing in the 1990s, Perloff is able to look back
several decades to review the poem and its repu-
tation over time; she concludes that the poem
stands out from all the metaphysical poetry that
was in vogue at the time of its publication.
While other critics have found flaws in the
poem, the overall consensus has always been
positive. Donald L. Hill, writing inRichard Wil-
bur, applauds Wilbur’s lightheartedness in
‘‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.’’
‘‘It is good to follow this free and playful excur-
sion of the mind,’’ Hill says at the end of his
discussion of the poem: ‘‘so unbound by anxiety,
so unhurried, serene, and good-humored. Good
humor—once again, let it be said—is one of the
primary aspects of Wilbur’s charm.’’ Bruce
Michelson, in his bookWilbur’s Poetry: Music
in a Scattering Time, echoes the emphasis on the
poem’s lighthearted demeanor: ‘‘People who
apparently enjoy little else in Wilbur’s work
delight in ‘Love Calls Us’ for its gusto and itsLove Calls Us to the Things of This World