`Not Subject to Our Stiff Geometries'

Today we celebrate the ninetieth birthday of the American poet Richard Wilbur, who reminds us that the world is a splendid place after all. I spent years acknowledging his gifts but denying myself the pleasure of enjoying them while permitting louder, coarser voices, including some among his prominent contemporaries, to drown him out. Wilbur’s voice is above all civilized – that is, witty, learned but not pedantic, musical, sensitive, attuned (though not abjectly) to tradition, even encouraging and entertaining. In a recent interview, Wilbur notes he has written and published only one free-verse poem in seventy years. He adds:

“I was just pointing out to a friend of mine that, in the dictionary, `formalism’ and `formaldehyde’ are very close; and I'm afraid a lot of people think of form that way. I have no interest at all, really, in meter, per se, or in rhyme patterns, or in received forms. It's all in what you do with them, or indeed against them. The great poets have always been violators of meter.”

This is bracing, and hardly a secret to readers of Milton and Pope. The notion of meter as a straightjacket to inspiration, a wet blanket thrown across sincerity, is self-servingly delusional. Meter and rhyme sing, in the proper hands. “It’s all in what you do with them,” as it is with every other good thing in life. Here is one of the new poems from Collected Poems 1943-2004, “In Trackless Woods”:

“In trackless woods, it puzzled me to find
Four great rock maples seemingly aligned,
As if they had been set out in a row
Before some house a century ago,
To edge the property and lend some shade.
I looked to see if ancient wheels had made
Old ruts to which the trees ran parallel,
But there were none, so far as I could tell --
There'd been no roadway. Nor could I find the square
Depression of a cellar anywhere,
And so I tramped on further, to survey
Amazing patterns in a hornbeam spray
Or spirals in a pine-cone, under trees
Not subject to our stiff geometries.”

Fourteen iambic lines, all but the ninth – the one on which the poem begins to turn -- with precisely ten syllables. “Amazing” is threadbare but the line ends with the lovely “hornbeam spray.” Despite the rhyming couplets, the poem defies the “stiff geometries” it might have calcified into. The poem touches, even formally, on a favorite Wilbur theme – the persistence of order in a disorderly world. The title of his third collection was Things of This World (1956), and he echoes it in the recent interview:

“Poetry is concerned with things, and with making them vivid, and what metaphor does is to render some part of the world more vivid by comparing it– sometimes violently– to something else….it makes the thing under consideration far more solid and it gives you a more intense and surprised perception of the interlaced objective world, of things as they are.”

[Richard B. Woodward has a fine appreciation of Wilbur in the Wall Street Journal.]