different stages in life. What keeps man running?
Itishuman aspiration: [....]
‘‘Running’’ is by Wilbur’s own admission
one of his most personal poems. It also implies
the middle-aged poet’s belief that his own life is
satisfying and worthwhile.
The title poem, ‘‘Walking to Sleep,’’ begins
with a discussion of going to sleep that soon
becomes a meditation on how to live and a warn-
ing against a life of illusion. It is also an argu-
ment for accepting death without illusions by
literally staring it down. This might be regarded
as a climactic poem on a major thematic con-
cern. What is recommended is once again a bal-
ance, a life in which reality and ‘‘strong dream’’
work together.
One of the few poems in the volume to be
almost immediately anthologized, ‘‘Playboy’’
describes the imaginative response of an adoles-
cent stockboy to the impact of a centerfold in
Playboyshowing a beautiful naked woman[....]
Other poems are also atypical of Wilbur’s
usual themes. He even includes a protest poem
addressed to President Lyndon Johnson; the
occasion is not the Vietnam War but Johnson’s
refusing the official portrait painted by the artist
Peter Hurd. The protest is more artistic than
political. The poem makes a contrast between
Johnson and the culture of Thomas Jefferson
with his Rotunda and ‘‘Palestrina in his head.’’
Although the poems were published in the midst
of the Vietnam vortex, Wilbur is once again
primarily concerned with maintaining ‘‘a diffi-
cult balance’’ between reality and the ideal as the
way to personal fulfillment.
Wilbur’s sixth volume of poetry,The Mind-
Reader(1976), contains twenty-seven new poems
(nine previously published inThe New Yorker)
and nine translations. The reviews were again
mixed, with some reviewers praising his crafts-
manship and defending him from what they
regarded as unfair attacks on his conservatism
as a poet; others found his new volume to be
simply more of the same and lamented his not
taking risks by seeking new directions. The trans-
lations provide new examples of Wilbur’s superb
ability to translate from the French and the Rus-
sian, especially the poems by Andrei
Voznesensky.
There are new things in the volume, espe-
cially in Wilbur’s clearly discernible movement
toward simpler diction and more direct poems.
Except for the title poem there are no long poems
in this book. Wilbur seems to enjoy working
with shorter poems, as in the six-line, three-cou-
plet ‘‘To the Etruscan Poets,’’ on the theme of
mutability exemplified by the Etruscan poets[....]
Some reviewers found ‘‘Cottage Street,
1953’’ to be provocative. It is an account of
Wilbur’s meeting a young Sylvia Plath and her
mother at the home of his mother-in-law, Edna
Ward. A contrast is made between Plath’s
destructive tendencies and Ward’s power of
endurance. A few reviewers read the poem as if
it were a personal attack on Plath by a poet
hostile to confessional poetry. The poem is
undoubtedly intended as a variation on Wilbur’s
theme of a need for balance, which he later came
to realize that Plath had always lacked. He
opposes love as a principle of order to the ‘‘bril-
liant negative’’ of Plath in her life. What makes
this poem exceptional is that Wilbur is dealing
with real people characterized rather brilliantly:
[....]
In this poem Wilbur deals with the human
problem of survival and death without his usual
detachment and with a directness his poems usu-
ally lack.
More representative of his usual type of
poem is ‘‘A Black Birch in Winter.’’ It could
have appeared in any of Wilbur’s first five vol-
umes. A symbol (the black birch) is found for
nature’s ability to survive and grow to greater
wisdom each year. Except for slightly simpler
diction, the poem is a variation on a usual
theme, and the conclusion seems a parody of
the conclusion of Alfred Tennyson’s ‘‘Ulysses’’:
[...]
One poem would seem on the surface to be
atypical, Wilbur taking the unusual risk of
involving his poetry in the political protest
against the war in Vietnam. ‘‘For the Student
Strikers’’ was written for the WesleyanStrike
Newsat the time of the Kent State shootings.
Wilbur’s support is not, however, for student
protests but for their canvassing programs,
house-to-house visits to discuss the student
point of view about the war. Typically, he urges
dialogue—order—instead of protests—disor-
der: [....]
There is an evident difference in emotional
perspective, in dramatic intensity, and in con-
temporary relevance between Wilbur in this
poem and Lowell inNotebook 1967-68.Love Calls Us to the Things of This World