to America his translation, The Misanthrope
(1955), was published and performed at the
Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In 1954 Wilbur was appointed an associate
professor of English at Wellesley College, where
he taught until 1957. His third volume of poetry,
Things of This World, was published in 1956. In
his September 1956 review of the collection for
Poetrymagazine Donald Hall concluded: ‘‘The
best poems Wilbur has yet written are in this
volume.’’ His judgment was confirmed, as the
collection remains Wilbur’s most honored
book; it received the Edna St. Vincent Millay
Memorial Award, the National Book Award,
and the Pulitzer Prize. The same year the musical
version of Voltaire’sCandide, with lyrics by Wil-
bur, book by Lillian Hellman, and a score by
Leonard Bernstein, was produced at the Martin
Beck Theatre in New York City.
Three poems inThings of This Worldshould
certainly be ranked among Wilbur’s best, ‘‘A Bar-
oque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra,’’ ‘‘Love
Calls Us to the Things of This World,’’ and ‘‘For
the New Railway Station in Rome.’’ The last two
reveal the influence of his year spent in Rome on a
Prix de Rome fellowship. As the title would sug-
gest, there is even a greater stress on the impor-
tance of the use of the real in the poems in this
volume. 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.
Even nuns move away from pure vision back to
the impure, ‘‘keeping their difficult balance.’’
It is not always the simpler forms that are
the most inspiring. Wilbur remarked in the
anthologyPoet’s Choice (1962) that ‘‘A Baro-
que Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra’’ was
based on his daily observation of a ‘‘charming
sixteenth-or seventeenth-century fountain that
appeared to me the very symbol or concretion
of Pleasure.’’ The elaborate baroque fountain is
described as an artistic embodiment of the
pleasure principle. Human aspiration may be
more clearly seen in the simpler Maderna
fountains[....]
It is indicative of Wilbur’s penchant for
impersonality that he ends the poem not by indi-
cating the personal delight he feels in the foun-
tain but by imagining what Saint Francis of
Assisi might have seen in the fountain:[....]
The final poem in the volume is one of the
best, ‘‘For the New Railway Station in Rome.’’
The impressive new station becomes a symbol of
how man’s mind must continually work on things
of this world for the imagination to have the
power to re-create and to cope with disorder: [....]
Donald Hill has said of Wilbur’s early
poetry that he has seemingly taken William Car-
los Williams’s slogan ‘‘No ideas but in things’’
and altered it to ‘‘No things but in ideas.’’ Begin-
ning with his third volume,Things of This World,
Wilbur still recognizes the importance of the
imagination, but his emphasis has clearly shifted
toward Williams’s concept in his stress on the
need for things of this world, both for effective
endurance in a world of death and disorder and
for creativity.
In 1957 Wilbur began a twenty-year tenure
as professor of English at Wesleyan University
and as adviser for the Wesleyan Poetry Series.
He also received a Ford Foundation grant in
drama and worked with the Alley Theater in
Houston.Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems,
his fourth book of poetry, was published in 1961.
It is a larger volume of poetry thanThings of This
World, with thirty-two poems, including four
translations and a passage translated from
Moliere’s` Tartuffe, as well as ‘‘Pangloss’s Song’’
from the comic-opera version of Voltaire’sCan-
dide. The collection received favorable com-
ments from such critics as Babette Deutsch,
Dudley Fitts, M.L. Rosenthal, William Mere-
dith, and Reed Whittemore. But the praise for
Advice to a Prophetwas tempered by criticisms
that it had an academic, privileged, even ivory-
tower perspective. The title poem is vaguely top-
ical, suggesting the threat of the ultimate atomic
holocaust that became a near reality in October
1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even here
Wilbur might be accused of aesthetic detach-
ment: his poem is not humanistic in its concerns
but aesthetic and phenomenological, envision-
ing a world without its familiar objects, without
things rather than without people: [....]
Perhaps still showing the influence of
Marianne Moore’s passion for oddities, Wilbur
stresses in this volume what the imagination can
do with apparently mundane things. In ‘‘Junk’’
he suggests that intimations of the ideal can be
found in the rubbish, the junk of the world, and
in ‘‘Stop,’’ in the grim everyday objects at a train
stop. In ‘‘A Hole in the Floor’’ Wilbur evenLove Calls Us to the Things of This World