Boy at the Window

The inscription Richard Wilbur chose for his tombstone is a key example of just how much of a misfit he was among the poets of his generation. It is a quote from his poem “Two Voices in a Meadow”: “Shatter me, great wind / I shall possess the field.” The cosmos can do with me what it wants, I will be happy with the world around me. 

This sense of the loving pull of the things of this world alienated Wilbur from the two principal poetry movements of post-war America. He was too content to fit within the school of confessional poets, most notably Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton, who elevated self-laceration and deep emotional wounding to the realm of poetry. He was a poet of praise and celebration, by disposition unable, or unwilling, to tap into complaint. And Wilbur simply did not feel he was all that interesting, nor were the small tragedies of his life worth casting into verse.

Nor, given his careful study of prosody and his keen ear for rhythm and rhyme, could he fit in with the emerging countercultural argument of the Beats, most prominently fellow New Yorker Allen Ginsburg who, along with his West Coast confederates, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, experimented with reconceiving poetry into loose and jagged lines with carefree innovations in aural effects that dispensed with rhythm and rhyme as untenable tyrannies. Wilbur argued the craft of the poet was to sculpt lines, that the sonic appeal of careful rhythm and deft rhymes created the aural effect that had defined poetry since antiquity.

In this, one of the more comparable literary figures was Robert Frost. But Frost was more snarky, more misanthropic, and too willing to concede the world to darkness to offer what Wilbur himself could not hold back: joy.