forth: instead, they represent the refinement of
his ideas.
Source:David Kelly, Critical Essay on ‘‘Love Calls Us to
the Things of This World,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale,
Cengage Learning, 2009.
Richard J. Calhoun
In the following essay, Calhoun gives a critical
analysis of Wilbur’s work.
Richard Wilbur has always been recognized
as a major literary talent and as an important
man of letters—poet, critic, translator, editor—
but he has never quite been ranked as one of the
two or three best contemporary American poets.
Early in his career he was overshadowed as a
poet by Robert Lowell, who won the Pulitzer
Prize forLord Weary’s Castlein 1947 (the year
Wilbur’s first book of poems, The Beautiful
Changes and Other Poems, was published) and
whoseLife Studies(1959) was given principal
credit for important new directions in poetry
that Wilbur chose not to take. In the 1960s com-
parisons between Lowell and Wilbur as impor-
tant new poets became comparisons between
Lowell and James Dickey as the country’s most
important poets. Since the 1970s more critical
attention has been given to such poets as John
Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, James Wright, W.S.
Merwin, and James Merrill than to Wilbur.
For more than four decades Wilbur’s poetry
has remained much as it has always been—
skilled, sophisticated, witty, and impersonal. In
1949 when Philip Rahv inImage and Ideadivided
American writers into two camps—‘‘Palefaces,’’
elegant and controlled, and ‘‘Redskins,’’ intense
and spontaneous—Richard Wilbur was clearly a
‘‘Paleface.’’ After Lowell made his break in 1959
with modernist impersonality in poetry, he
revised Rahv’s distinction in his National Book
Award comments by specifying American poets
as either ‘‘cooked’’ or ‘‘raw.’’ Wilbur’s ‘‘marvel-
ously expert’’ poetry was undeniably one of the
choice examples of ‘‘cooked’’ poetry. InWaiting
for the End(1964), at a time when poetic styles
were moving away from impersonality, Leslie A.
Fiedler, one of the advocates of the reemergence
of the ‘‘I’’ at the center of the poem and of a neo-
Whitmanesque rejection of objectivity, found the
influence of T.S. Eliot’s formalistic theories espe-
cially strong on Wilbur: ‘‘There is no personal
source anywhere, as there is no passion and no
insanity; the insistent ’I,’ the asserting of sex, and
the flaunting of madness considered apparently in
equally bad taste.’’
Wilbur has seldom likened his poetry to that
of his contemporaries. Instead, in ‘‘On My Own
Work,’’ an essay collected inResponses, Prose
Pieces: 1953-1976(1976), he described his art as
‘‘a public quarrel with the aesthetics of E.A.
Poe,’’ a writer on whom he has written some
significant literary criticism. In Wilbur’s view,
Poe believed that the imagination must utterly
repudiate the things of ‘‘this diseased earth.’’ In
contrast, Wilbur contends it is within the prov-
ince of poems to make some order in the world
while not allowing the reader to forget that there
is a reality of things. Poets are not philosophers:
‘‘What poetry does with ideas is to redeem them
from abstraction and submerge them in sensibil-
ity.’’ Consequently, Wilbur’s main concern is to
maintain a difficult balance between the intellec-
tual and the emotive, between an appreciation of
the particulars of the world and their spiritual
essence. If he is explicit in his prose about his
quarrel with Poe, it might also be said that he
had an implicit quarrel with the ‘‘raw’’ poetry in
Donald Allen’sNew American Poetry 1945-60,
an anthology recognized in the 1960s as a man-
ifesto against the ‘‘academy,’’ and also with the
extremely personal, seemingly confessional
poetry of Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, and Anne
Sexton. Wilbur as a poet clearly accepts the
modernist doctrine of impersonality and does
not advertise his personal life in his poetry. ‘‘I
vote for obliquity and distancing in the use of
one’s own life, because I am a bit reserved and
because I think these produce a more honest and
usable poetry,’’ he commented in a 1967 ques-
tionnaire inConversations with Richard Wilbur
(1990).IF THE IMAGINATION DOES CREATE A WORLD
INDEPENDENT OF OBJECTS, IT IS MADE CLEAR IN ‘LOVE
CALLS US TO THE THINGS OF THIS WORLD’ THAT LOVE
ALWAYS BRINGS ONE BACK TO THE WORLD OF
OBJECTS.’’Love Calls Us to the Things of This World