A note about Richard Wilbur in Conversation with Peter Dale

Writing about this 96 page volume, which as well as its lengthy interview contains a career sketch, a comprehensive bibliography, a representative selection of quotations from Wilbur's critics and reviewers and the title poem of Wilbur's most recent collection, Mayflies, critic Ian Tromp said:

'Even without the mastery of his poetic voice, Richard Wilbur would be outstanding among his contemporaries for the sheer generosity of his vision. In this conversation Wilbur speaks openly and intimately of his poetry, his translations and his life. We meet an uncomplicated, wholehearted man; intelligent, humorous, reflective, passionate in his affections, his views, and his friendships. Reading this exchange with Peter Dale demonstrates the sense and insight of Theodore Roethke's well-known description of Wilbur as "Not a graceful mind [...] but a mind of grace, an altogether different and higher thing".'

A note on Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur was born in New York City in 1921, the first son of Lawrence Lazear and Helen Ruth Wilbur (née Purdy). When he was two years old, the family moved to North Caldwell, a small town in New Jersey, where he and his younger brother Lawrence grew up in rural surroundings.
    Wilbur was attracted to painting in his youth, but eventually chose to pursue writing instead, something he attributes to the influence of two people – his mother’s father, and her grandfather, both of whom worked in the newspaper business. As a schoolboy, he wrote editorials, stories and poems for Montclair High School’s newspaper and magazine, and as an undergraduate, he contributed stories and poems to Amherst College’s student magazine, Touchstone, as well as editing the campus newspaper, The Amherst Student.
In 1942, Wilbur graduated from Amherst, married Mary Charlotte Hayes Ward, and signed up for the Enlisted Reserve Corps. Sent to Europe the following year, he joined the 36th (Texas) Infantry Division, and saw action, first at Monte Cassino, later at Anzio, and later still along the Siegfried Line. It was during this period that he began, as he described it later, ‘to versify in earnest’.
    After the war, Wilbur went to Harvard to study for an MA. He graduated in 1947, and that year published his first collection, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems. The book was enthusiastically reviewed by Louise Bogan, Babette Deutsch, Richard Eberhart, Robert Fitzgerald, M.L. Rosenthal, and other critics of note, and caused Wilbur to be spoken of in the same breath as Robert Lowell, whose Lord Weary’s Castle had been published to great acclaim the year before, and whose penchant for formality bore a superficial resemblance to Wilbur’s own.
    Wilbur spent the next three years as a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. Then, in 1950, the year in which he was appointed Assistant Professor at the university, he published his second collection, Ceremony and Other Poems. This book was also well received, with David Daiches, John Frederick Nims, Peter Viereck and others joining in the chorus of praise. One influential critic did sound a discordant note, however, and that was Randall Jarrell. While allowing that Wilbur was the best of the younger poets then writing, and commending him for his lyric and descriptive powers, Jarrell nevertheless proposed that he was ‘not a very satisfactory poet’, arguing that ‘[m]ost of his poetry consents too easily to its own unnecessary limitations.’
    From 1955 until 1957, Wilbur was Professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. In his second year there, his third collection, Things of This World, appeared. Donald Hall declared that the book contained ‘the best poems Wilbur has yet written’, and he wasn’t alone in his judgement: John Ciardi, Paul Engle and Anthony Hecht all spoke highly of it. Things of This World won that year’s National Book Award, as well as the Pulitzer Prize.
    Shortly before arriving at Wellesley, Wilbur had been approached by Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman, and asked to produce lyrics for the comic operetta they were working on, Candide. The collaboration, though fruitful, was not always easy. Bernstein evidently thought well of his own abilities as a writer, with the result that a sorely-tried Wilbur had once to tell Hellman, ‘If you catch [Lenny] re-writing my lyrics, clip his piano wires.’
    After leaving Wellesley, Wilbur went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where, in addition to teaching and writing, he was responsible for initiating and then advising on the University Press’s poetry programme, something whose success led other university presses to set up poetry lists of their own.
    Wilbur remained at Wesleyan for almost twenty years, and during that time published three more collections of verse – Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems (1961), Walking to Sleep (1969) and The Mind-Reader (1976) – as well as a collection of critical essays, Responses (1976). Many more honours also came his way, amongst them: the Edna St Vincent Millay Award (1957), a Ford Fellowship (1960), the Melville Cane Award (1962), two Bollingen Prizes (1963 and 1971), the Sarah Josepha Hale Award (1968), the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award (1970), the Henri Desfeuilles Prize (1971), and the Shelley Memorial Award (1973).
Of the two Bollingen Prizes listed above, the first was awarded for work in a field for which Wilbur was to become especially noted – translation. The verse translation of Molière’s Tartuffe which secured him the prize had been preceded by a verse translation of the same writer’s The Misanthrope – it was the critical success of this that had brought Wilbur to the attention of Bernstein and Hellman – and by translations of poems by Valéry, de Thaun, Jammes, Baudelaire, Nerval, Quasimodo and Guillén. Later still, Wilbur would turn his hand to translating Molière’s The School for Wives, The Learned Ladies, The School for Husbands, Sganarelle, or The Imaginary Cuckold, Amphitryon, Don Juan and The Bungler, Racine’s Andromaque and Phèdre, and poems by the still more diverse grouping of Villon, d’Orléans, Vosnesensky, Akhmatova, Borges, Morshen, Brodsky, Voltaire, du Bellay, La Fontaine, Apollinaire, de Moraes, Baudelaire, Petrov, Dante, Cassian and Mallarmé.
    Between 1977 and 1986, Wilbur was back in Massachusetts, as Writer in Residence at Smith College, where his wife had once been a student. Though he published no new collections during this period, three of his Molière translations did appear, along with a quantity of critical and other work, including his edition of Witter Bynner’s Selected Poems. The list of honours also lengthened, with the addition of the Harriet Monroe Award (1978), the PEN Translation Award (1983), the Drama Desk Award for Translation (1983), the St Botolph’s Club Foundation Award (1983), and a Camargo Foundation Fellowship (1985).
    In 1987, Wilbur succeeded Robert Penn Warren and became Poet Laureate of the United States. In its earlier incarnations – as Chair in Poetry and then Consultancy in Poetry to the Library of Congress – this post had been held by a string of distinguished figures – amongst them Robert Frost, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop and Anthony Hecht – so when William Logan, one of America’s more astringent critics, declared that ‘the honour [done to Wilbur] was not misplaced’, readers knowing something about the British Laureateship and nothing about the American should not suppose that he was being ironic.
    By this time, though, Wilbur will have grown accustomed to seeing himself written off by his more hostile critics, described as an empty formalist, eloquent anachronism, or some such. What Robert von Hallberg said in an essay written for The Cambridge History of American Literature is not untypical: ‘A number of features of 1950s verse are epitomized in [Wilbur’s] style. His poems are deliberately ornate, obviously rich in consonance and assonance, superficially indebted to Hopkins. His language is insistently figurative. Everything is seen in terms of something else – “this mad instead”, he calls it in a self-critical moment. To emblems, similes, and pretty phrases, he is devoted – to just those types of figurative language that make no claim to spontaneity or sudden revelation. His poems constantly offer the charm of wit, but rarely the force of conviction.’
    In 1988, however, twelve years after The Mind-Reader, Wilbur’s New and Collected Poems appeared, and a number of its reviewers called for a reappraisal, urging that, as one of them put it, ‘there are poems throughout ... that will take any preconception by surprise, poems ... that we’ve had in mind and by heart for years, the first sign that a book is likely to remain a classic.‘ The same critic, nodding in the direction of Wilbur’s detractors, also pointed out that ‘if there is sometimes too much varnish, the draftsmanship is always impeccable, the composition noble, the colouring warm and affecting.’
    With the publication of New and Collected Poems, Wilbur’s list of honours lengthened once again, this time with the addition of a Bunn Award (1988), the Washington College Literature Award (1988), the St Louis Literature Award (1988), the Taylor Poetry Award (1988), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1988), and a second Pulitzer Prize (1989). The book also secured a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award (1988).
    Since 1988, Wilbur has published a second volume of essays, The Catbird’s Song (1997). He has also received the Gold Medal Award for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1991), the Edward MacDowell Medal (1992), the National Arts Club Medal of Honour for Literature (1994), the PEN/Manheim Medal for Translation (1995), the Milton Center Prize (1995), and the American Academy Achievement Award (1995).
    Wilbur’s eighth volume of poems, Mayflies, was published by Harcourt in April 2000, a few weeks after the poet celebrated his seventy-ninth birthday.

– Philip Hoy, 2000

A note on Peter Dale

Peter Dale was born in Surrey in 1938, and educated at Strode’s School, Egham, and St Peter’s College, Oxford. For twenty-one years he was head of the English department of Hinchley Wood School, Esher, and concurrently an editor of the poetry quarterly Agenda. Well-known for his Penguin verse-translation of Villon, he has recently published a terza-rima version of Dante’s Divine Comedy and his selected poems, Edge to Edge, both with Anvil Press Poetry Ltd. His Richard Wilbur in Conversation with Peter Dale was published by Between The Lines in 2000. Revised and extended editions of his Poems of François Villon and his Poems of Jules Laforgue appeared from Anvil in 2001. He currently edits a poetry column for Oxford Today.

An extract from the interview

Mariani’s biography of Berryman records that you and Berryman once went together to get Delmore Schwartz released from the police-station after one of his drunken excesses. How well did you know these two? Did the Dream Songs come as a shock? They seem to have shaken Lowell a bit.

I never knew Schwartz very well, though he and I had served together on an NBA jury which gave the prize to Red Warren’s Brother to Dragons, or perhaps to a book of Conrad Aiken‘s. And we’d once had an evening’s rambling talk in Syracuse, admiring Socrates (as I remember) for drinking the hemlock rather than letting his friends spirit him away. On the occasion mentioned by Paul Mariani, Schwartz was in fact more mad than drunk, as the police knew by the time Berryman and I arrived at the station. He was shouting through the bars of his cell, ‘Everything I do is done on the orders of the Chief Executive,’ and the police, who didn’t wish to cope with madness, were glad to let us pay his drunk-and-disorderly fine and take him away. From the early ‘60s on, Berryman and I were friends and, though we saw each other seldom, were in frequent touch by mail or telephone. John often called at the damnedest, darkest hours of the night. His successive book-manuscripts were sent me for criticism, as they were to Bill Meredith and a number of other friends. It troubled me to say – as I did – that the latter books, though full of fine flashes, were uneven and not up to the Dream Songs. He was generous toward my work, and it was at his urging that I got going on a translation of his favourite Molière play, The School for Wives.

I heard Geoffrey Hill, when asked at a poetry reading why he wrote such glum poems, reply, ‘Because it pleases me to be gloomy.’ Unusually, perhaps, for a poet of the twentieth century, you are not attracted by gloominess.

Well, gloom isn’t very agreeable in everyday conversation, but I think that Geoffrey Hill is quite right to say that in poems it can be pleasing: Tennyson and Longfellow can be gloriously morose, and Auden tells the poet to ‘Sing of human unsuccess / In a rapture of distress.’ Affirmation and delight can also be pleasing in poems. Indeed, a lyric or song-like poem can satisfy by the strong, simple expression of any emotion whatever. But when poetry becomes more complex than a song, and offers more than a single mood or message, a good part of its power to please must lie in its articulation of a whole consciousness, with all its doubts, ignorances, shifts, and contradictions. Articulateness exalts us, regardless of what is said. I have an inclination to be positive, but I hope that in most of my work I’m not a cheerleader for the universe but a describer of how it feels to be in it.

Well, it’s commonly said that happiness writes white. But at the back of your optimism and equability there seems to be some supporting kind of faith in an ultimately benign world. Could you say something that might confirm or qualify this impression?

I do have such a trust. Voltaire’s Candide, with which I’ve had a long working acquaintance, argues rightly that it’s inhuman to be sunny in the presence of agony and disaster. But to trust in the ‘ultimately benign’ nature of things is another matter. I should add that, though I once experienced a severe depression through the unwitting over-use of valium, it’s my nature to be of good cheer.

I suppose a poem like ‘Children of Darkness’ suggests a kind of faith in the ultimate goodness of the world:

Gargoyles is what they are at worst, and should
They preen themselves
On being demons, ghouls or elves,
The holy chiaroscuro of the wood
Still would embrace them. They are good.

One can see how a conservationist or evolutionist might think these fungi and whatnot are good in that they fill an essential role in the cycle of things, but you mean to imply more than that?

Yes, the poem is about fungi, and their bad reputation in folklore, and the good work that they do in the renovation of nature. At the same time, it may be read as a brisk, oblique, forty-five line statement of what Milton more grandly argues in Paradise Lost: that, in the great rhythms of the creation, good is brought out of evil.

An unattuned British ear might feel that it neatly expresses an intellectual or even religious idea but, to put it oddly, it doesn’t feel as if you felt it on the pulses, to adapt Keats. This is a type of criticism I am sure you have encountered before, and not just from the ‘wilder’ end of the poetic world: Jarrell wrote: ‘In Wilbur the man who produces the poems is somehow impersonal and anonymous.’

If I have your permission to be a little hazy, let me begin by saying that many people, just after World War II, experienced that shaken sense of meaning and purpose which led, in France, to existentialist philosophy and the lonely, depleted figures of Giacometti. In such an atmosphere, there could be a special charge on any writing which tried to be passionately faithful to things, to external reality. A poem of that kind could offer not merely the capture of something in words, but a sense of escaping from the isolate ego in the direction of ‘the other’, and ultimately, perhaps, toward a more intelligible human world. Back in 1948, after a poetry conference at Bard College, I said that sort of thing at length in an essay awkwardly called ‘The Bottles Become New, Too’, in which I responded to the conference speeches of Louise Bogan and William Carlos Williams; Bill Williams was one poet in whom I found the kind of drama I’m talking about: in a poem like ‘Young Sycamore’, he’s on-stage only in the first line, where he says ‘I must tell you’; the rest of the poem – what he urgently wants to say – is wholly concerned with conveying the upward sweep and ramification of a small street-side tree, from sidewalk-level to the tip of its crown. Williams is full of poems in which he breaks out of himself and makes implicitly ecstatic contact with some part of reality; a few pieces of broken glass in the gravel can suffice him. I found, in my early days, a related quality in Marianne Moore’s descriptive coups, in those poems where Lawrence outwitted the ‘obscene ego’, and in the Francis Ponge who wrote Le Parti Pris des Choses.
    All that may begin to explain why one of my earliest poems says ‘have objects speak’, and praises ‘the devout intransitive eye’ of Pieter de Hooch. Rightly or wrongly, I felt back then that it could be downright good to seem anonymous, and to let much of one’s notions and emotions be implicit – as, for instance, in Williams’ little poem ‘Between Walls’. I was encouraged in this, no doubt, by Eliot’s recommendation of impersonality, by my own reserve, and by my dislike of lapel-grabbing persons and poems.

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