I noticed that several poets the other day, responding to the latest National Book Award longlist, declared our era a “golden age” of poetry. With the death of Richard Wilbur (on the heels of the passing of Derek Walcott), I feel it is the end of an era. Ubi sunt. Wilbur and Walcott were major poets whose poems, I believe, have an effect upon the language for the long haul. There are few of these.
I didn’t know Richard Wilbur, except through his poems. I reviewed his Collected Poems 1943-2004 when it came out, and it seemed to me that with this publication Wilbur had established himself as a major poet. The book was so good, it took me much of the winter break to read it. Just to give some perspective, at the time I had read another new book of pretty good poems, and it took me an afternoon. This is one measure of a great book of poems. It takes time. No wonder no one reads poetry.
I only met him twice. The first time was when he visited our MFA poetry workshop at the University of Florida. He was around seventy-five at the time, and he seemed to me to carry himself as if he were a man of fifty. I remember him talking about his process. He said that he wrote slowly and methodically and, for example, he didn’t go on to the next line till he had finished the previous line. While I was in awe of that, there was no way I’d ever try that method. For me, for better or probably worse, writing poems is, as one of the fiction writers in that same MFA cohort put it: . . . like a monkey picking peanuts out of a great pile of elephant crap. The second time I met Wilbur was at the West Chester University Poetry Conference in 2008, where he was the keynote poet. We only talked briefly about haikus before a friend of his came and pulled him away to something more important. Sigh.
His poem “A Measuring Worm” had just been published in The New Yorker in February. It is a poem made of five haikus strung together, a little nature poem about mortality. It seems slight, but it is probably one of the best poems of the first decade of the 21st century. Michael Peich of Aralia Press, and head of the conference at that time, printed a letterpress broadside of the poem. Those of us who came to the letterpress demonstration all got a free one. I regret that I didn’t get Wilbur to sign mine; I was too shy. The last stanza of the poem reads:
And I, too, don’t know
Toward what undreamt condition
Inch by inch I go.
Wilbur is talking about that inchworm never fathoming the possibility of its ultimate metamorphosis. Wilbur, a Christian poet, likely believed in the resurrection of a new body though, in the here and now, this resurrected body is merely “undreamt” and unimaginable. However, there is a formal beauty here reaching beyond the images of worms/wings. For Wilbur, we know those inches he usually works in are feet. The feet (and musical feat) of the measure of poetry in English. The iamb. Though here, in this poem, our most mannered and formal of contemporary poets chooses to abandon the iamb and reaches instead for the syllable. Perhaps that is the inch he refers to. The great poets show us there is always something new to do with form. Free verse poets who have a bias against form do so, not because they can’t do the form (though many can’t), but because they fail to imagine how to do it anew. Often, they see traditional forms as limiting. But look how the form frees Wilbur’s poem to do so much more just in these three lines.
I also love how Wilbur’s last two words in this poem are “I go.” The words show a paradoxical movement forward and a final halting. Richard Wilbur is gone. His poetry goes forward. As Auden flatly and unromantically said of Yeats: “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living . . . For poetry makes nothing happen.” Yet . . . “it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.”
I go.