“You can be a scholar if you like, but I assure you that erary life. Wilbur is a lover of jazz and a great joker who draws course, and talented young poets like Maxine Kumin ’46, A.M. ’48, Thurber-like cartoons. A cryptographer in the army, he enjoys John Ashbery ’49, Robert Creeley ’49, Frank O’Hara ’50, Robert puzzles and vanquishes books of crosswords in odd moments. Bly ’50, Donald Hall ’51, and Adrienne Rich ’51 populated the class- Wilbur’s strong feeling for plants, animals, and natural phe- rooms. Wilbur studied Poe with Hall, and notes that even though nomena infuses many of his poems. Rural life has always appealed “Bly never took a course with me, I did teach him how to throw a to him; though born in New York City, he grew up on the gentle- boomerang. I took him down to the football field, gave him his in- man’s farm of a retired English textile manufacturer in North structions, and he turned out to be a promising boomeranger.” Caldwell, New Jersey: “All the benefits of country living, without Wilbur’s first big break came when André du Bouchet sent the labor,” he says. It was not an arty home, but Wilbur recalls, “If some of his early work to the publishing firm Reynal & Hitch- you wrote anything, drew any- cock, which was on the look- thing, or played any instrument, out for new talent. “Soon I had it was approved of. That was a phone call saying, ‘Mr. Wil- better than an atmosphere of The Writer bur, we’d like to publish a book exhortation.” His father was a In her room at the prow of the house of your poetry,’” he recalls. portrait painter (“All he want- Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden, “That’s the most painless path ed to do was paint”) and his My daughter is writing a story. to getting a book published I’ve mother came from a long line ever heard!” The result was The of journalists; when Wilbur I pause in the stairwell, hearing Beautiful Changes (1947). edited the student paper at From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys In December 1948, Wilbur Montclair High School in New Like a chain hauled over a gunwale. sent the New Yorker a poem Jersey and later at Amherst Col- called “Year’s End.” Soon, New lege, from which he graduated Young as she is, the stuff Yorker editor Katherine S. in 1942, he wrote everything Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy: White was on the phone. “Mr. from reports on wrestling I wish her a lucky passage. Wilbur, we want to use your matches to editorials, news, and poem in our year-end issue,” features, and drew cartoons. “I But now it is she who pauses, she said. “There’s no time to thought I might follow a family As if to reject my thought and its easy figure. send you proofs, so we’ll have tradition and be a multiple- A stillness greatens, in which to talk through it on the threat journalist,” he says. phone.” Wilbur quickly as- But he also published a few The whole house seems to be thinking, sented. “You don’t seem to have poems in those student papers, And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor any understanding of the di≠er- and as a teenager listened Of strokes, and again is silent. ence between which and that,” to Robert Frost reading his she began. “I don’t at all,” Wil- own poems at the Montclair I remember the dazed starling bur admitted. “Which sounds Women’s Club, the first time Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago; like a brisk word and that is a Wilbur had ever heard a poet How we stole in, lifted a sash soft-sounding word.” White read to an audience. (Later, he replied, “Fowler [author of Mod- learned that Charlee’s grandfa- And retreated, not to affright it; ern English Usage] wouldn’t find ther, clergyman William Hayes And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door, that acceptable,” then added, Ward, was the first person to We watched the sleek, wild, dark “But Fowler was British, wasn’t publish a Frost poem, in the he, and we’re an American mag- New York Independent.) And iridescent creature azine, so we’ll let it go.” When he arrived in Cam- Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove Fortune soon smiled on him bridge in the fall of 1946, “the To the hard floor, or the desk-top, again. He had taken his lan- flavor of Harvard was quite in- guage exams in German and toxicating, because of the great And wait then, humped and bloody, was on his way to a Harvard influx of former servicemen on For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits doctorate when, after only one the GI Bill,” Wilbur says. “Peo- Rose when, suddenly sure, year of postgraduate study, “by ple were really spoiling to read, tremendous luck, I was taken write, and talk about literature It lifted off from a chair-back, into the Society of Fellows.” and the arts. They were starved, Beating a smooth course for the right window Professor of history and litera- and just giddy with the tran- And clearing the sill of the world. ture F.O. Matthiessen and Eng- sition. Everyone felt lucky.” lish professor Harry Levin, a se- Archibald MacLeish, Boylston It is always a matter, my darling, nior fellow of the society, professor of rhetoric and ora- Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish backed him for the prestigious tory, was soon to teach a poetry What I wished you before, but harder. fellowship, which gave him free

38 November - December 2008 COPYRIGHT © RICHARD WILBUR. REPRINTED FROM COLLECTED POEMS, 1943-2004 (HARCOURT). ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED WITH PERMISSION faculty in 1957 and stayed for 20 years. To “keep his hand in” as a nets and villanelles but taut quatrains, couplets of all sorts, writer, he requested, and received, every third semester o≠ with Provençal ballades, flawless terza rima, comically polysyllabic pay. He moved to Smith College for 10 more years of teaching be- exact rhyme….” The poet has published only one free-verse (lack- fore retiring in 1986. ing rhyme and regular meter) poem in his life. He always preferred subject-matter courses to creative-writ- Yet Wilbur declares that he has no interest at all in form per se ing seminars, and consistently spent six or seven hours preparing (“In the dictionary, formalist isn’t far from formaldehyde”) or in po- for each hour of class time. “Looking back on 40 years of teach- etic craft for its own sake. “The kind of poetry I like best, and try ing, the thing I don’t like about my performance is that I always to write, uses the whole instrument,” he says. “Meter, rhyme, mu- cared too much about seeming omniscient, and didn’t let the stu- sical expression—and everything is done for the sake of what’s dents do as much talking as they being said, not for the sake of pret- should have,” he says. “They learn tiness.” At the same time, he be- it when they say it for themselves, lieves that “For anyone who knows and sometimes students sitting Blackberries for Amelia how to use these forms powerfully, around a table discover some- Fringing the woods, the stone walls, and the lanes, they make for a stronger kind of thing quite fresh. It’s satisfying Old thickets everywhere have come alive, poetry than free verse can ever be.” when they find out things that no Their new leaves reaching out in fans of five “All these traditional means are one had found out before.” From tangles overarched by this year’s canes. ways of being rhythmically clear,” In 1956, Things of This World ap- They have their flowers too, it being June, he explains: “making the emphases peared, winning the Pulitzer Prize And here or there in brambled dark-and-light strong, making it clear what words and National Book Award; it con- Are small, five-petaled blooms of chalky white, are important. Rhyme is not just tains what is probably Wilbur’s As random-clustered and as loosely strewn making a jingling noise, but telling best-known poem, “Love Calls Us what words deserve emphasis. to the Things of This World.” After As the far stars, of which we now are told Meter, too, tells what the rhythm of this pinnacle of success, years of That ever faster do they blot away, thought is. It doesn’t necessarily critical disparagement followed. And that a night may come in which, some say, sound like music, but it has the “Beginning in the 1960s, to write We shall have only blackness to behold. strength of sound underlying my kind of poetry, to write in everything being said. I encourage meter and often in rhyme, was I have no time for any change so great, my students to memorize poems. If seen as altogether retrograde and But I shall see the August weather spur a poem is good, it is well to say it old-hat,” he explains. The intro- Berries to ripen where the flowers were– again and again in your mind until spective “confessional” poetry Dark berries, savage-sweet and worth the wait– you’ve found all the intended tones popularized by Robert Lowell ’39, and emphases.” He adds, “One of Litt.D. ’66, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia And there will come the moment to be quick the great fascinations of poetry is Plath (Wilbur’s poem “Cottage And save some from the birds, and I shall need that you’re going almost naked: the Street, 1953” describes his singular Two pails, old clothes in which to stain and bleed, equipment is so small, just lan- meeting with the suicidal Plath) And a grandchild to talk with while we pick. guage.” took poetry in a direction that Today, Wilbur is one of the few contrasted sharply with Wilbur’s active major poets writing rhymed more oblique approach to self-ex- A Measuring Worm verse in English; “Rhyming,” he as- pression. “When those distinc- This yellow striped green serts, “will never go away.” Braham tions between ‘palefaces’ and ‘red- Caterpillar, climbing up quotes him on the subject: “Robert skins’ came around, I was in- The steep window screen, Frost had a wonderful way of variably a ‘paleface,’” he says in putting it. He said, ‘Bad poets Jeanne Braham’s 2007 book The Constantly (for lack rhyme words; good poets rhyme Light within the Light, which profiles Of a full set of legs) keeps phrases.’ That’s central to my way four modern poets, “and when po- Humping up his back. of composing a poem. I want the etry was dubbed either ‘raw’ or rhyme to happen inevitably, as a ‘cooked,’ mine was definitely It’s as if he sent part of the flow of the argument— ‘cooked.’” By a sort of semaphore not as a way of completing an arbi- Though he says that every new Dark omegas meant trary pattern. That latter thing is poem is an experiment, Wilbur is just ornamentation, doily-making.” no avant-gardist; he has steeped To warn of Last Things. Daniel Aaron observes that his himself in the history of his art Although he doesn’t know it, “sense of form and control carries since antiquity, and builds on this He will soon have wings, out the tradition of English lyric heritage. “Wilbur’s collections poetry. Dick’s poems will last; double as sparkling cyclopedias of And I, too, don’t know they have finish, humor, detach- forms,” writes associate professor Toward what undreamt condition ment, coolness, elegance, precision. of English Stephen Burt, in a Inch by inch I go. There’s always something held scholarly critique, “not just son- back. The (please turn to page 93)

“BLACKBERRIES FOR AMELIA”: COPYRIGHT © RICHARD WILBUR. REPRINTED FROM COLLECTED POEMS, 1943-2004 (HARCOURT). ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED WITH PERMISSION. Harvard Magazine 41 “A MEASURING WORM”: COPYRIGHT © 2008 RICHARD WILBUR. REPRINTED FROM THE NEW YORKER (FEBRUARY 11, 2008). ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED WITH PERMISSION.