as Trilling did Frost but rather reckons him ‘‘a
serious artist for an anxious century.’’ He iden-
tifies in many of the poems not just ‘‘safe creeds
and certainties’’ but, significantly, a tone of
‘‘skeptical virtuosity’’ that has gone largely
unrecognized.
If one is satisfied to judge Richard Wilbur in
terms of his intentions, he has achieved them
well. Nonetheless it is clear he has not been a
poet for all decades. In the 1950s his view of
poetic creation was compatible with that of the
dominant critical view of his generation of
emerging poets, the ‘‘rage for order view’’ of
creativity promulgated by the formalistic New
Criticism. By the 1960s formalism was no longer
the dominant critical approach, and man’s rage
for order was balanced by an interest in man’s
rage for chaos. In the 1970s modernism had been
supplanted by a neo-Romantic postmodernism.
Critics discovered the virtues of political correct-
ness by the 1980s and Wilbur seemed relatively
lackluster as a poet who was neither politically
correct nor notably incorrect.
What Wilbur’s critics and his readers must
not disregard is his mild irony, sophisticated wit,
effective humor, and, as Michelson has appended,
his seriousness. His craftsmanship and skill with
words and traditional poetic forms should also be
considered. Wilbur is a formalist who at his best
manages to make formalism seem continually
new. For many readers, his poetic art always
was, and still is, sufficient.
Source:Richard J. Calhoun, ‘‘Richard Wilbur,’’ inDic-
tionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 169,American Poets
Since World War II, Fifth Series, edited by Joseph Conte,
Gale Research, 1996, pp. 297–311.
John Gatta
In the following excerpt, Gatta provides a
straightforward interpretation and explication of
‘‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.’’
...Wilbur’s early classic, ‘‘Love Calls us to
the Things of this World,’’ remains an essential
statement of affective response to this volatile
world.
The poem begins, of course, with a homely
scene: a man awakens suddenly at the sound of
clothesline pulleys to see God’s own plenty of
laundry flapping outside in the breeze. Yet Wil-
bur’s speaker is no passive observer but a freshly
revitalized ‘‘soul.’’ Lately ‘‘spirited from sleep,’’
he entertains a kind of transcendent vision albeit
one tethered firmly in facts of this world. Wind
and the moment’s shock of inspiration conspire
to turn laundry pieces into spirit bodies:
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they
wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal
breathing.
This sudden apprehension of enspirited mat-
ter in flow, conveyed poetically with the help of
enjambment, initiates the soul’s movement
toward encounter with a world that is at once
volatile and bodily. And yet the speaker’s first
ecstatic but dazed response—‘‘Oh, let there be
nothing on earth but laundry’’—is only prelimi-
nary. The soul still needs to in-corporate the ‘‘deep
joy’’ of this transcendent epiphany within the quo-
tidian light of day, to progress inwardly toward
acceptance of a carnal and self-contradictory
world. We can even suspect a naive immaturity
in the speaker’s first impulse to resist the progress
of dawn, which he conceives for the moment as a
‘‘punctual rape of every blessed day.’’
But following the sun, which ‘‘acknowledges /
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,’’
so also the soul eventually ‘‘descends once more in
bitter love / To accept the waking body’’ of self
and world. After tasting the ‘‘bitter’’ mystery of
incarnational love, the man intones a new word of
hortatory blessing:
‘‘Bring them down from their ruddy
gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of
thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure
floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.’’
Uttered in a ‘‘changed voice’’ of authority
beyond either euphoria or bitterness, this bless-
ing partly ‘‘undoes’’ the previous ‘‘rape of every
blessed day.’’ It reflects not only an achieved
recognition of earthly actualities, of the need to
balance claims of the material and spiritual
realms, but also something like a divine charity
of acceptance and forgiveness for the whole
range of characters enacting the human comedy.
In its playful aspect, the poem ends up displayingLove Calls Us to the Things of This World