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When most of the U.S. Armys 36th Texans division shipped from
Marseilles to Newport News in mid-October 1945, Sta Sergeant
Richard Wilbur remained behind with the occupation forces in
Germany. The army had transferred Wilbur, without explanation,
from his post as code technician to the automatic weapons unit of
an artillery battery a position for which he was completely
untrained and unqualied. This delay in his return home might
have been a superiors retaliation for twenty-one feisty columns
Wilbur had published in The T-Patch, his divisions newspaper,
one of which expressed bemusement that a major would wear
riding boots and carry a crop and a pearl-handled revolver in the
absence of horses or enemies.
With happier abruptness, he was sent to Marseilles in midNovember to board a troop transport, and on the 29th he was honorably discharged from active duty at Camp Edison, New Jersey.
That same evening he arrived at a Manhattan hotel, where his
wife, Charlee, was waiting. When asked years later to name the
hotel, he condently remembered that it was the Plaza. Charlee
corrected him. The hotel, near Times Square, charged by the hour,
and she had brought her own bed linens; such accommodations
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were all Charlee could book in a city swamped with returning

G.I.s.
Not surprisingly, Dick looked drained and pale to Charlee despite his relief and joy at being home alive, intact, and in her
arms. He was still thin, 160 pounds on his 6 foot 2 inch frame
though that was an improvement on the 153 he had weighed
when reporting for active duty in 1943.
When the couple arrived the next day at his parents home in
North Caldwell, New Jersey, two-year-old Ellen was in the front
yard, playing in the snow. Wilbur bent down to gently introduce
himself to his daughter he hadnt seen her since the army
granted him compassionate leave for a few days after her birth.
Over the next six weeks in North Caldwell, he began to recover,
not only from post-traumatic stress following eighteen months,
exposure to explosives and the unrelenting demands of swiftly
decoding crucial messages, but also from months of frustration at
being kept in Germany when hed been fully entitled to return
home (he had accrued ninety-one demobilization points; eighty
usually earned immediate discharge). Surrounded by understanding family and friends, and soon caught up in academic life, he
recovered energy and composure.
Wilburs transition from war to graduate study seemed eortless
from the start. He was much better read in both literature and
politics in 1946 than when he had graduated from Amherst in 1942.
In the downtime between wars mundane duties and its moments
of terror, Wilbur would borrow from the Armed Services Library,
which by 1945 oered troops over thirteen hundred titles, both
classic and current. He browsed and often bought from bookstalls
while on leave in Paris and London; Charlee regularly shipped him
titles he requested by V-Mail. A volume with a selection of Gerard
Manley Hopkinss poetry and notebooks made an immediate impact; after acquiring it, Hopkinsesque compound words comicaldelicate, priestgoat, muchtouched, and lightshifting appear in the poems he composed in all caps on his sigaba code
machine. Wilburs indignant and impolitic commentaries on cultural and political ashpoints in the 36th Texans division newspaper which had renewed with increased lan the aggressive
journalism he practiced while editor of The Amherst Student laid
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the groundwork for his vivid academic prose style at Harvard, as

well as for his poetry. Both set him apart.
Wilbur, Charlee, and Ellen arrived at 22 Plympton Street in
Cambridge in mid-January 1946. Tom Wilcox and his bride, Darlene, whod alerted the Wilburs to a second available apartment in
the house theyd moved to only a few weeks earlier, welcomed
them. The Wilburs apartment needed work. Dick and Charlee
scraped and painted walls, reupholstered chairs, bought additional
furniture, and declared themselves lucky to have the place despite the Wilcoxes toilet backing up into their laundry tub and
dead mice decaying pungently in the walls.
Plympton Street was only a few minutes walk to Widener
Library, Wilburs classes, and the squash courts, where, as Wilbur
reported in a letter to their Amherst professor and mentor Armour
Craig, Wilcox beats me 3 or 4 times a week. Tom and Dick had
begun their friendship at Amherst when the alphabetical proximity of their surnames made them seatmates in several courses.
After graduation Tom and Charlee had kept in touch by letter,
getting together when Tom was passing through New York during
his ight training or on the frequent leaves available to peripatetic
Army Air Corps pilots. (Wilbur had grumbled good-naturedly to
Wilcox when Charlee wrote in 1943 that shed spent the evening
with Tom in Manhattan, his last before joining his B-17 crew in
England.) Charlee and Darlene had met only a few months before
the move to Cambridge, but they had hit it o, and the couples
remained friends for years.
Though the atmosphere at 22 Plympton was warm and highspirited, a competitive undercurrent between the two close friends
extended beyond the squash court as they embarked on the Harvard cursus honoram. Although both Wilbur and Wilcox entered
graduate school intent on earning doctorates in English, Wilbur
kept in reserve the rsum and the talents to switch to a journalistic career if it turned out that either he or Harvard failed to fulll
their promise. But Wilbur took to Harvard like the racehorse
Charlee believed she had married. He correctly identied every
spot passage across seven centuries of English poetry on his rst
exam, and this mastery of the British and American poetic tradition eased his passage through his course work.
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Wilbur was well placed to join in the postwar upsurge in poetrys

popularity. Many veterans had written poems at the front, and they
found in Cambridge an attentive literary public. Harvards house
system, in which students themselves organized the social life of
their dining and sleeping communities, provided handy venues for
readings. John Ciardi was already on the faculty, and the poets
Donald Hall, John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Frank OHara, Kenneth
Koch, and Adrienne Rich had all arrived as undergraduates at the
university by the late 1940s. Although Wilbur had written and
polished dozens of poems while serving as a cryptographic technician, he was reluctant to make the transition from a poet at war to
a poet at Harvard. He accepted Robert Frosts caution that you
werent a poet until others declared you one. Andr du Bouchet,
whom he met within weeks of coming to Cambridge, would do that
for him, soon and memorably.
During his rst three semesters Wilbur completed all the
coursework required for a Ph.D.; in two summer sessions in 1946
he took back-to-back German courses and passed one foreignlanguage exam of the three required. (Had he continued toward
his doctorate he was suciently skilled in French and Latin to
pass exams in both languages.)
Wilbur and Wilcox, however, were quickly initiated into the
perils of the doctoral exam system in early February 1946 when
Armour Craig failed his orals, during which the examiners had
apparently peppered him with philological and bibliographical
questions that stumped him, and had not given him a chance to
impress them with his critical and pedagogic abilities. (Craig had
been teaching at Amherst since 1940 and had rapidly earned a
reputation for his learning and the analytic rigor of his teaching.)
Visiting the Wilburs apartment immediately afterward, he was
both devastated and angry, telling his two former students that he
blamed political bias for his failure.
Nevertheless, Craig remained curious about academic protocol
and goings-on in the Harvard classroom. He had asked Wilbur to
describe his teachers and generalize about the Harvard professoriate. Acutely aware of his mentors disappointment, Wilbur alluded
to Craigs setback when he nally sent him his assessment of the
academic atmosphere Since your awful experience here, we
have not written you, on the theory that anything would oend.
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and expounded his views with some asperity in a letter to Craig

and his wife Peggy:
At present we [he and Wilcox] are taking the same courses,
under [Hyder] Rollins, [Douglas Bush, a jr. Fellow named
[Walter Jackson] Bate, & [Frederick] Deknatel (ne
arts). . . . The nearest [Rollins] has come to textual criticism
or enthu-siasm, was last Wednesday, when he developed a
glottal catch over a bathetic 3-lines of Marmion whether
it was emo-tion or phlegm I cannot say for sure. Bush we
like; but he is patently miserable teaching a conference
group of 65 per-sons, & his lectures are unprotable. Bate, a
young man with a dewey-decimalled mind, is very
enlightening to talk to, & is concerned with philosophic
ideas & their relation to litera-ture in much the same way
Armour is. However, he gives his lectures by means of a
grand heap of papers, from which he reads full sentences at
top speed & with a Rabbinical absorp-tion. . . . There is no
time to weigh or condense. . . . We were saying yesterday
that Amherst classrooms really spoiled us, & made us expect
something of the lecture system.
Armour Craig, devoted to Amherst and his role there, must have
been cheered to nd that his former students found at least some
part of their Harvard experience lacking.
The dissatisfaction Wilbur expressed touched on Amhersts
competitive attitude toward Harvard at least regarding their
respective English Departments during the immediate postwar
years. Many Amherst faculty had Harvard degrees, and one,
Reuben Brower, returned to accept a tenured position at Harvard.
Amherst routinely sent many of its best English majors to Harvard, including such distinguished gures as Brower, William
Pritchard, Thomas Whitbread, David Ferry, and Richard Poirier.
The literary cultures of the two institutions diered: Harvard
sought the most distinguished scholar in a research specialty, regardless of interest in or aptitude for teaching; Amherst chose
committed teachers who were expected to instill, regardless of a
students eld of study, an ability to close read a text, and a sophisticated awareness of the practical relations between experience,
reality, and verbal or artistic expression.
The specic complaints Wilbur expressed to Armour and Peggy
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Craig were widely shared by his fellow students in Harvards

graduate English program. (Harvard as a whole received in January 1946 a three-thousand-strong inux of returning veterans,
many of them, like Wilbur and Wilcox, not originally Harvard
students, but newly enrolled.) The English Department itself,
perhaps aware of its deciencies, had asked returning graduate
students (that is, those absent from the program during the war) to
respond to an extensive questionnaire. When asked if their training at Harvard had been less good than expected, 70 percent had
answered yes. Their written comments were more blunt, if less
graphic, than Wilburs: Too impersonal; designed to turn out
research men and editors, not teachers. Too divorced from real life
or student needs. Gross waste of time in classes. Insucient
supervision of individual scholarship. Not enough professorstudent relations either professionally or socially. Complete lack of
interest in students.
The endemic indierence of the faculty that Wilburs peers
resented seemed not to apply to him. In a matter of months both
he and Charlee began to receive the respect and the invitations
that made their life at Harvard and on Plympton Street absorbing,
pleasurable, and privileged. While they were still living in Cambridge the literary world imposed a myth and a trajectory on the
couple that recalled (admittedly within a much smaller arena)
Scott and Zelda Fitzgeralds Jazz Age aura. (They found it especially fun to evoke the comparison at parties by performing a
Charleston duet, crossing their hands over at the knees in rhythmic perfection.) Wilbur found a relative comfort zone in which to
account for the dierence between his sense of himself when
young (awkward, shy) and his developing public persona (lanky,
handsome, deep-voiced, convivial, well-mannered, and multigifted). Early on he adopted, at least in his letters and among his
friends, a deadpan, mock-abusive but self-deprecating, fun-loving,
and frequently expletive-improvising tone. One of Charlees many
gifts notably her skill at nessing the usual social rituals so she
could discover what really mattered to and interested the person
she was talking to proved an invaluable asset. (As the poet Henry
Taylor wrote after her death in 2007, Charlee lifted my spirits
just by crossing my mind.) While they remained on the Cambridge scene, the Wilburs were invited everywhere. In early SepY

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tember 1947, just twenty months after their arrival at Harvard, the
young poet John Brinnin, who would become the Wilburs lifelong
friend, summed up their appeal in his journal:
The Wilbur years had begun. The meaning of the term
would vary. But its common factor would be the incessantly
portable party spirit Dick and Charlee had maintained since
the time of their courtship. He at Amherst, she at Smith,
theyd met at the western end of the college highway and,
to some less than beguiled observers, had never left it. But
like everyone else these killjoys were glad to sit at their table,
tag along on their midnight forays into the jazz joints of
Columbus Avenue, play their word games and, above all, bask
in the radiance of success and normality they brought to lives
with precious and small purchase on either.
Shortly after their arrival on Plympton Street the Wilburs met
Andr du Bouchet, an introduction probably initiated by Armour
Craig or Theodore Baird, another Amherst professor and friend
(both had taught du Bouchet during the war). Wilbur reported to
Craig in February 1946 the exhilaration, as well as the tribulation,
du Bouchet brought into their circle.
Andr . . . has been a regular visitor, & we enjoy him a great
deal. . . . Charlee is now taking a course of reading under him,
beginning with Gides Les Caves du Vatican. Andrs attitudes are so opposite to mine, or at any rate so absolute, that
we have the most animated disputes. His own criticism I can
only dene as writing a poem to criticize a poem. It comes,
very often, to How wonderful! but quite as often to something creative in itself. As Existentialist, he upbraids me for
justifying Empsonian Criticism [i.e., literary criticism based
on close textual reading and which excludes social, autobiographical or political contexts] as a ne teaching method
I am not to think of myself as a potential teacher but as an
individual. At any rate, Andrs mordant attacks & personal
energy have given us a pleasant shaking, & set us to dreaming, over late beer, of a year at the Sorbonne.
Du Bouchets most immediate and dramatic impact on Wilburs
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bur wrote to Craig: Andrs taste I cannot aord to doubt, since he

is about to print 6 of my poems in Foreground, where he is poetry
editor; he has been most hyperbolic abt. my poetry, & thinks it wd
be best for Wilcox & me to go to France, where intellectuals can be
properly arrogant. (Arrogance was an indulgence Wilbur would
eschew, in France or anywhere else, as he established his public
persona in an ever-widening circle of writers and academics.)
While visiting the Wilburs one winter afternoon in 1946, du
Bouchet leafed through the purloined copy of Helmbrecht le Fermire (a French translation of an early German narrative poem)
that Wilbur had brought back as war spoil from a seaside Riviera
villa. Inside it he found a copy of Tywater, whose brilliance he
immediately recognized. At about the same time, Charlee gathered a sheaf of Wilburs poetry and asked du Bouchet to read
through it. He took the typescripts away for an hour or so, returned to 22 Plympton, kissed Wilbur on both cheeks, and pronounced him a poet.
Before the war, Wilbur had had almost no luck placing his prose
or poems outside school or army publications, in part because hed
seldom tried. Following graduation from high school in 1938, he
sent a short prose piece to The New Yorker; the editors pleasantly
declined it with an invitation to submit again. During his rst
semester at Amherst he sent another article, which was more
brusquely rejected. Charlee tried to place a few poems he sent to
her during the war in several magazines, but she succeeded with
only one; Italy: Maine appeared in The Saturday Evening Post of
23 September 1944, thanks to the inuence of a friend at the
magazine.
Du Bouchets pronouncement changed everything. Wilbur began to submit and publish poems in local and national journals, as
well as the newly launched literary magazine Foreground, which
attracted to its earliest issues some world-class contributors. A
piece by Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, appeared adjacent to Wilburs short story The Day After the War in Foreground s second
issue.
A New York publisher, Reynal and Hitchcock, had engaged du
Bouchet to scout for literary talent among the veterans now ocking to Harvard and Cambridge, and he urged the editors to ask
Wilbur to send them a selection of his poems. Wilbur did, the
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editors were impressed, and in March 1946, editor Monroe Engel

wrote, Our editorial department has been reading your poems
with a great deal of interest. Condent of a favorable nal verdict, Engel oered to send around Wilburs unpublished poems to
magazines that might want to publish them. By the time the book
was released, well-established journals, including The Harvard
Advocate, Accent, Poetry, and New Directions, had accepted his
work. Wilbur added and Engel welcomed new poems to his
book manuscript until the delivery deadline of 1 June 1947.
Early on, Wilbur had suggested Water Walker, the collections
longest poem, as its title. Engel joshed him about this, since he
thought the rustic building Wilbur stood next to in the jacket
photo looked like an outhouse and had the potential to impose a
double entendre on the title. The issue was resolved when Wilbur
wrote a poem that began, The beautiful changes as a forest is
changed. Those rst three words become the title of the poem
and the book. As a book title it provided a more elegant double
entendre; without the context of the poems rst line, the word
changes can be read as a verb or a noun.
For some three months after its September 1947 publication, The
Beautiful Changes received admiring reviews by Louise Bogan, Robert Fitzgerald, Babette Deutsch, M. L. Rosenthal, Richard Eberhart,
David Daiches, and Francis Golng, all of whose reputations as
accomplished poets and/or critics immediately burnished Wilburs
own. A phrase from Louise Bogans review soon became a watchword of low-key critical perspicuity: Let us watch Richard Wilbur.
He is composed of valid ingredients. Her word ingredients was apt,
as she identied several poetic aptitudes in the space of a single
paragraph: He has a remarkable variety of interest and mood, and
he can contemplate his subjects without nervousness, explore them
with care, and then let them drop at the exact moment that the
organization of the poem is complete. . . . Wilburs gift of tting the
poetic pattern to the material involves all sorts of delicate adjustments of the outward senses to the inner ear. Fidelity to Nature (that
old fashioned virtue) underlies every word, and this delity is directed by intelligence and taste.
Francis Golng was also impressed, calling the book remarkable, but thought Wilbur too often spoils his chances by concessions to modishness (his example is the insertion in a line of a
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showy but, he thought, superuous German word, heilgnuchterne,

borrowed from Hlderlin) and by attempts at genres that lie
outside his range, citing The Regatta and Superiorities.
While Bogan had sought to spur Wilbur on, Golng cautioned
him to secure . . . serious attention by staying within his proper
competence. Golng might have felt that his strictures were too
grudging; he concluded the review by stating that two poems,
Grace and The Beautiful Changes, were as good as any poetry
written in English today, save Eliot and Stevens at their best.
Though only 358 copies of The Beautiful Changes were sold by
31 December 1948 (not counting the books sent to reviewers,
literary gures, and Wilburs friends), it immediately raised Wilburs visibility. More journals and anthologists sought his work.
Newspapers and magazines asked him to review new books of
poetry, which he did, expressing his dislikes and reservations
freely, as was the practice of the postwar era. But he was never a
self-aggrandizing or combative reviewer, and in time he restricted
his reviews to books he admired.

From his early days as a graduate student Wilbur sought to keep

his sense of himself as an apprentice scholar separate from his
sense of himself in solitude, when not attempting, or required, to
play a role. This distinction is clear from a notebook he kept
during his Harvard years, in which he never mentions his classroom experience or assignments or professors. He used it to record
various events and meditations, including being narrowly missed
by a stockbroker who jumped, inconsiderately, Wilbur thought
(evoking a bit of his indignant and outrageous high school columnist voice), from a seventh-oor window to a crowded Boston
sidewalk.
The notebook begins with several pages of his early poems,
some written in Europe, some newer, and yields for a reader today
Wilburs close and continuing observation of Cambridges literary
culture and an analysis of his shifts in self-perception as his war
receded and he confronted the Harvard community:
Nostalgia for war is primarily a sense of the loss, through the
acquisition of property, security and the future, of the sense
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of the self. In Italy and France I owned nothing my duel

bag was something given me to carry, if lost replaceable; my
clothing was G.I. issue; my duty was nothing chosen, the
appellation of Sergeant something unsought; I was never
likely to confuse myself with my possessions or with Sgt.
Wilbur. It was insane, for anyone, to plan a future; therefore
I did not think of myself as a crescent anything. The self of
which I was aware was so isolate, so disjoined from what it
wore or did, so much a thing of the present moment, so little
a career, that at any instant its possibilities seemed innite.
. . . The soldier is theatrical my dealings with all but two or
three persons overseas were consciously thespian a way of
defending the critical lump of being called the self. As Tom
[Wilcox] says, when I appeared in Piccadilly as a young
bomber pilot . . . I now regret the loss of interval between
myself and my role I have caught myself thinking of myself as a young man preparing for the teaching profession,
as a young poet of promise; I let the praise and blame of
people strike past my persona to myself.
Wilburs Harvard notebook entries (with seldom a crossed-out
word, never a rewritten sentence) oer an early clue to the composure he gradually assumed as he grew older and which he still
inhabits, one of easy and witty accessibility guarding an inner
reserve. Even his penmanship, an italic hand he practiced with
delight, is precisely measured and executed. His conversational
eloquence in these passages, also characteristically, stretches beyond the academic formulations he was hearing and reading in his
coursework. For instance, he contrasts the novels of Henry James
with our [current] debased habits of imagination. The mysteries, the unspoken realities, the unlived lives of Jamess ctions
interested him. Absent from his critical practice is the abstract
categorizing, dening, and summing up that displeased his fellow
graduate students in their experience of the Harvard English Department. Wilbur wrote:
The real themes of literature, the ageless endless ones, are
the ones you never learn. Joy you never learn, death you
never learn, renewal is always unexpected, love is a perpetual
rediscovery. One reads Nashe and nods; yes brightness falls
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from the air. That all passes and nothing stays is a thing
admitted, agreed to; on the other hand we always pretend of
some things that they are changeless a spiritual legerdemain and so keep calm. But calling at a house and nding
all the people gone, or seeing a woman terribly beautiful, or
the tall cons of strong men who have died strength
stoops to the grave teaches you mutability again. And you
run to rhyme to heal the horror of it.
The phrase you run to rhyme captures the power physiological as well as emotional of a poem to heal, both for the person
who writes it and the person who reads it. Several of Wilburs war
poems, particularly Tywater, The Eyes of an SS Ocer and
Mined Country, were early attempts of his own to come to terms
with (or nd relief from) violent wartime experiences. The idea of
mutability, much on Wilburs mind in this notebook, is inherent
in the texture of The Beautiful Changes. Louise Bogan noticed and
referred to an aspect of it, writing that Wilburs delicate adjustments convey delity to Nature. At Harvard the mutations of
fortune he encountered were almost all auspicious. One so altered
his approach to academic study at Harvard, and to the role poetry
played in it, that it changed the trajectory of his career.

During 1946 Wilburs immediate poetic success upon meeting

Andr du Bouchet and his academic performance so impressed the
faculty that he was invited to apply for a Junior Fellowship
despite its name the highest accolade Harvard could bestow on
one of its students. As a Junior Fellow he could remain at Harvard,
take courses (and even teach one) outside the Ph.D. structure and
requirements, and become an employable academic without earning a doctorate. The award, which he received in April 1947 (the
fellowship ocially started the following semester), came with an
additional perk, as it allowed him to travel to Europe and spend as
much time as he wished writing poetry.
Harvard initiated the Society of Fellows to reward originality
and nonconformity among its own and the nations graduate students and, with what some might call its own self-awareness, to
protect its best students from Harvards institutional timidity. The
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Society had its origins in the admiration of several Harvard professors in the 1920s for the Prize Fellows program of Trinity College, Cambridge. Trinity would conduct a yearly competition
among its graduates to identify men most likely to make important advances in the sciences and the great humanistic disciplines,
such as classics and philology. Trinitys Prize Fellows program
succeeded spectacularly. According to a 1926 report presented at
Harvard by a committee of four that included Lawrence Joseph
Henderson, a professor of biological chemistry who was instrumental in shaping the Society of Fellows, one-half of the British
Nobel Prize winners, one-fth of the civil members of the Orders
of Merit, and four of the ve Foulerton Research Professors of the
Royal Society were Trinity Fellows.
Trinitys practice of singling out its own exceptionally promising students (and supporting them for up to six years as they
worked on whatever interested them), intrigued Henderson and
Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Harvards president. Both were extremely forceful men (Hendersons method in discussion, one of
his colleagues said, was feebly imitated by the piledriver). Both
sensed something was amiss in American graduate education.
What bothered them at Harvard was the institutions lack of success in producing scholars who made intellectual breakthroughs.
Too often they had observed even the brightest and most adventurous graduate students succumb to pressure to choose a safe
dissertation topic and accept the safe academic berth it assured.
Lowell and Henderson decided to treat this vexing situation as an
opportunity. In 1926, Lowell appointed Henderson and several
other Harvard professors, as well as a member of the universitys
Board of Overseers, to develop a program that would identify the
most promising original minds in Harvards graduate programs,
gather them together for frequent conversations facilitated by
regular meetings at lunch and dinner, and support them with
living accommodations, oces, and a salary equivalent to that of
an assistant professor. Lowell in particular was insistent on making the amenities and the money attractive. He saw no reason not
to incorporate capitalist principles into his academic regime. Traditional scholarly success was explicitly downplayed as the decisive
qualication for membership in the Society.
Lowell did not succeed immediately in his eort to persuade
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the Harvard overseers to fund his idea. And during the Depression, it proved impossible to nd a benefactor who would provide
an endowment that would force the overseers hand. So Lowell
took matters into his own hands, resigned as Harvards president,
and donated, anonymously, more than a million dollars in 1933 to
launch the Society of Fellows, whose success in identifying genius
soon rivaled that of its Trinity inspiration.
Both Wilbur and Tom Wilcox were nominees for membership
in the Society when the Senior Fellows voted in spring 1947. An
incident that deeply distressed both friends occurred when Wilcox
picked up the mail delivered to 22 Plympton from the hall table,
spied the Societys return address on an envelope, looked cursorily
at the rst three letters of the addressees name, and tore open the
letter. His heart leapt at the initial pleased to inform you phrase.
But as he read on he realized that the letter had been addressed to
Wilbur, and that he had not in fact been awarded a Junior Fellowship. Wilcoxs expectations had been high. He had received excellent grades during his rst semesters at Harvard. At Amherst his
critically prescient senior honors essay on American proletarian
novelists, combined with his grades, earned him a degree magna
cum laude, while Wilbur, though he received four As and a B his
senior year, got no honors. But since his arrival at Harvard, Wilbur
had established a reputation not only as an accomplished poet but
also as a serious and original scholar in both literature and art
history.
The Senior Fellows task, based on Trinity tradition, was to
identify applicants who possessed not only brilliance in their disciplines, but also enough imagination and impatience to extend its
reach or revolutionize its assumptions. Since 1933 the Society has
been remarkably successful in this mission. Though the letters
supporting Wilburs candidacy are sealed until 2027, it is likely
that F. O. Matthiessen, I. A. Richards, and Frederick Deknatel
wrote on his behalf. Wilbur believes that his essay Degas and the
Subject, written for Deknatels course in nineteenth-century European painting, helped convince the Senior Fellows to vote in his
favor. The essay expertly deployed and extended the vocabulary of art history, suggesting that Wilbur could easily have shifted
his graduate work to that eld.
Wilburs primary purpose in the essay was to establish Edgar
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Degass precise relation to his subjects and to dierentiate it from

those of his fellow artists in nineteenth-century France. Degas was
clearly not an impressionist, though he had exhibited with the
impressionists in at least one of their annual shows. Wilbur began
his essay by identifying this dierence: the impressionists adopt
attitudes toward their subjects; Degas dramatizes the inherent
action in his models poses and in his ballet, theatrical, and racetrack scenes. In this passage from the essay Wilbur accepted the
classication of Degass subjects the Dance, the Caf Concert,
the Races, Modistes (hat and dress designers), Laundresses, and
Nudes formulated by Paul Lafond, an art critic and the rst
Degas biographer:
In all these [canvases] there is some element of characteristic
physical movement: the formal gestures of the danseuse and
the chanteuse, the immemorial nervous grace of the thoroughbred horse, the stylized movements of the modiste and
the woman of fashion, the ironing-womans coup appuy and
coup circulaire [pressure stroke and circular stroke], the habitual actions of the toilette. What is to be deduced from this?
. . . Degas was primarily fascinated by the problem of arresting
fugitive and typical movement; . . . his art is one of acute perception of the momentary dispositions of bodies in exertion.
Wilbur never published Degas and the Subject, and it is the
only essay from his Harvard years that he preserved. Later critics
reached similar conclusions, but no earlier critic, French or English, anticipated the approach Wilbur formulated in 1946. In the
latter part of the essay Wilbur cited literary analogues to Degass
artistry in Zola and Joyce. He ended with this summation: As portraitist, and as the artist of the ballet, the races, the nude, and his
other favorite subjects, Degas is unique among the artists of his
time because his paintings are psychological or dramatic interpretations of his subject; his portraits are epiphanies of character,
and his paintings of contemporary life are dramatizations of a
metaphysic.
While studying Degas, Wilbur had noted that the English literary critic Cyril Connolly dened Degas as a dandy. Deknatel provided further context for dandyisms origins in Regency England,
the Victorian sobriety that snued it out there while it lived on in
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Paris, and embodied in the personalities and works of Oscar

Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and Max Beerbohm its reappearance in
England in the 1890s. The dandy was not only a social and cultural
phenomenon, but also a source of bemusement and a spark to energize intellectuals and poets. Wilbur was drawn to the subject and
read various accounts of the dandy, including a biography of Beau
Brummell by Captain William Jesse and Jules Barbey DAurevillys
slim, hyperbolic, and at times insuerable 1833 volume Dandyisme. But what he drew into his essays argument was an anity he
detected between the aesthetic of Degas and the principles of dandyisme that Baudelaire had epitomized: Le Dandy doit aspirer
tre sublime sans interruption, il doit vivre et dormir devant un
miroir. Wilbur elaborates Baudelaires conception of dandyism
and attributes it to Degas as
a species of perfectionism, of sacramental behavior; it is also a
mode of self-defense, of safeguarding the personality, it requires a life of extreme order and discipline. The social
dandy is one who achieves . . . a perfect distinction and
graceful simplicity in dress, whose manners are so studied
that they seem eortlessly perfect, whose conversation is calculated to be coldly brilliant. The dandy does not follow
fashion, he makes it; the dandy is not aected by people, he
aects them.
In short, he is impregnable, isolated and perfect. He has
elected to be perfect in the trivia of life, and is therefore
committed to living for the moment; every moment contains
trivia. But his attitude toward trivia being that of a perfectionist, he can endow the tailoring of a glove with a sort of
religious signicance. Dandyism is a sacramental view of
life. The dandy in literature and art is rstly a formalist. He
strives for an impeccable style which will bear no trace of the
great labor and anguish it has cost him. He knows that elegance lies in simplicity and spareness, and he hates superuity. He does not openly express his feelings, but conceals
them in paradox, [in] ambiguity and in consequence. Just as
the social dandy strives to impress his society with his perfection, but cannot bear to give the impression of striving, the
dandy artist desires to produce emotion and thought without
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being boldly emotional or thoughty. He deals with the moment, the transient impression, the brief perception, and so
his art [has] subtle hints of sacramental signicance. The
dandy artist despises the public and commercialism. He does
not belong to any literary or artistic movement. He is essentially religious in a mystical fashion; politically and socially
he is an absolute conservative.
Wilburs portrait of the Baudelaire-Degas incarnation of the
dandy, while not intended as a poetic or personal manifesto, does
foreshadow some of his later convictions and attitudes, particularly the high standards he set for himself in literary and personal
life, his reserve when expressing emotion, and his search for religious illumination in the everyday world, all of which became
permanent aspects of his professional and poetic character. On the
other hand, his social life was fairly freewheeling, and he was
never a prig or, in modern political terms, a conservative. But
Baudelaires version of dandyism, which condemned bourgeois
taste while insisting on rigorous elegance and integrity, became for
Wilbur a permanent touchstone, and it helps explain his later
refusal to participate in the confessional, the Beat, or the agitprop
antiwar movements that began to dominate American poetry in
the late 1950s. The nature of the dandy (and certainly Beau Brummells success) derived entirely from his aect and sartorial style,
which, very much like Wilburs own, attracted notice not for its
bravura or ostentation but for its understated nesse. Dandy
became Baudelaires shorthand for a dedicated artist, and in 1947
Jean-Paul Sartre incorporated aspects of Baudelaires version of
dandyism into a book-length appreciation.
This examination of dandyism, had Wilbur pursued it as a possible dissertation subject, would have begun with Beau Brummells
rise, reign, and disgrace. Hed already written a poem in 1946 about
Brummells last years in Caen Wilbur had visited the city while
still a soldier, in July 1945 the safe haven to which Brummell had
absconded from unrepayable debts incurred during his years of unparalleled social success and inuence. But after several editors he
trusted rejected Brummell in Caen, including Andr du Bouchet,
Wilbur accepted its lack of distinction and put the poem aside and
he did the same for dandyism as a topic of research.
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One constant during his studies, noticeable at Amherst but

intensied at Harvard, was his application of knowledge and energy from his coursework to his other pursuits. The required
courses he took in Anglo-Saxon and in the English Renaissance
provoked him to write three memorable poems, Beowulf, A
World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness, and Merlin
Enthralled (all published in Ceremony in 1950). After studying
Degass style so intensely Wilbur began to write poetry as Degas
painted: he incorporated into his own art the drama and physical
exertion Degass brushstrokes evoked in horses, bathers, and
nudes. In the poems of Ceremony the language pulses and shimmers, from New Englands churning surfscapes to marvels of human dexterity, as seen in Juggler.
A ball will bounce, but less and less. Its not
A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience.
Falling is what it loves, and the earth falls
So, in our hearts from brilliance
Settles and is forgot.
It takes a sky-blue juggler with ve red balls
To shake our gravity up. Whee, in the air
The balls roll around, wheel on his wheeling hands,
Learning the ways of lightness, alter to spheres
Grazing his nger ends,
Cling to their courses there,
Swinging a small heaven about his ears.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Oh, on his toe the table is turning, the brooms
Balancing up on his nose, and the plate whirls
On the tip of the broom! Damn, what a show, we cry:
The boys stamp, and the girls
Shriek, and the drum booms
And all comes down, and he bows and says good-bye.
Wilbur turns verbs to nouns and vice versa for example, in Part
of a Letter, with the lines Easy as cove-water rustles its pebbles
and shells / In the slosh, spread, seethe, and the backsliding /
Wallop and tuck of the wave, and just that cheerful, / Tables and
earth were riding / Back in the minting shades of the trees. And
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he plucks verbs from their usual contexts and places them where
they give new energy and nuance, as in In the Elegy Season,
with lines that refer to fallen leaves: Haze, char, and the weather
of All Souls: / A giant absence mopes upon the trees. In The
Sirens, Wilbur dramatizes wanderlust as a physical force that
energizes a normally plaintive verb: a town and its streetlights
yearn for his company, forlornly pleading, Stay.
I never knew the road
From which the whole earth didnt call away,
With wild birds rounding the hill crowns,
Haling out of the heart an old dismay,
Or the shore somewhere pounding its slow code,
Or low-lighted towns
Seeming to tell me, stay.

American culture in the postwar years diered, of course, and not

nostalgically, from its current ways. Postwar Harvard was socially,
politically, and academically intense. Women were still in most
respects second-class citizens, in the workplace and in academia
Adrienne Rich, a Radclie student in the late 1940s, was not
allowed to enter the Poetry Room in Harvards Lamont Library,
its donor having designated it for men only. The closet was still a
barrier to public acknowledgment or acceptance of homosexuality.
F. O. Matthiessen, one of the most distinguished members of the
English faculty when Wilbur arrived, lived openly with a male
partner, yet he was often the extra man at the dinner party table.
Drinking well into inebriation at festive gatherings was expected
and for the most part enjoyed until Dylan Thomas demolished
such tolerance, at least in academia, in the early 1950s and
almost everyone smoked. Poetry held a central place in the literary
world. Poets of the postwar era were truly and permanently major
Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore,
T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, Dylan Thomas, Louise Bogan, William
Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop. Communism
had become anathema in both the public and private spheres,
though many, especially academics and union workers, thought its
socialist core made more sense than cutthroat capitalism. (At least
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one of Wilburs close Cambridge friends was an active member of

the Communist Party and tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit him.)
Even those professing only a theoretical respect for Marxism could
be summarily expelled from government, university, and publicsector jobs. Those who were members of Communist Party cells
were often prosecuted for advocating the overthrow of the government. A persons political beliefs and activism were serious
matters when they became public or were exposed by FBI informants. All of these circumstances directly aected the Wilburs,
were constant topics of discussion, and caused both alliances and
breaches among friends.
The most publicized case of the pursuit of Communists by the
House Committee on Un-American Activities (known as HUAC)
during the Wilburs years in Cambridge was the indictment of
Dirk Struik, an MIT mathematics professor, in 1950 for plotting to
overthrow the government. An FBI informant named Herbert
Philbrick, who for over nine years had been active in progressive
organizations in the Boston and Cambridge area, identied Struik.
The indictments of Struik and others generated by Philbricks
accusations caused a national uproar. When Wilbur joined a committee to raise funds on behalf of Struik, the FBI took note.
Decades later Wilbur learned from his Amherst fraternity
brother Stanseld Turner appointed in 1977 as Director of Central Intelligence that the FBI was aware of his political activities
and sympathies during the 1940s and 1950s. This news was uncomfortably reminiscent to Wilbur, whose pacist position at Amherst before Pearl Harbor, as well as his leftist sympathies and outspokenness during signal corps basic training, had caused Army
Intelligence to investigate him four months after he was called to
active duty in January 1943, deem him Suspected Disloyal, and
remove him from code training. Only the sudden mental breakdown of a 36th Texans division cryptographer kept Wilbur from
entering the war as an untrained combat soldier.
With the infusion of veterans as undergrads and graduate students, and an intellectual atmosphere open to such inuences as
Sartres existentialism and Europes Communist politics, American novelists and poets required new and more adventurous literary journals to get their works out. Andr du Bouchet had helped
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vard graduate who later founded New Directions. Its local contributors included, besides John Ciardi, Robert Lowell, and Wilbur,
three poets who soon became the Wilburs friends: John Malcolm
Brinnin, who did his graduate work at Harvard and taught for a
time at Vassar; Howard Moss, who became poetry editor of The
New Yorker in 1948; and Jacqueline (Jackie) Steiner, who had been
chosen by Vassar in her senior year to represent the school in the
Irene Glascock poetry competition at Mount Holyoke, was currently studying both poetry and singing, and was for a time the
partner of du Bouchet.
Throughout each academic year visiting literary celebrities performed on campus. In the notebook Wilbur began to keep in 1946,
he reected on the competitiveness such visits unleashed within
Harvards literati, a set from which he did not exclude himself:
The person most resented is he who acts with precisely our own
motives, but openly: we feel a vicarious exposure, and that is
painful. . . . Cambridge is full of lionizers, & . . . when the Sitwells
come to town there is the beastliest sort of scramble to meet them,
and much sour grapes from those who fail to.
Wilbur compared the appearance of a celebrity at a huge reception to the breaking up of a billiards rack: the celebrity rockets like
a white cue ball into a rack of tightly packed multi-hued admirers,
scattering celebrity seekers every which way, a dispersal from
which some never recover as the reception progresses and thus
never edge close enough to the celebrity to come away with an
anecdote. Dick and Charlee did, in fact, meet two Sitwells, Edith
and her brother Sir Osbert, in late winter 1949 when Richard
Eberhart and his wife, Helen, invited them to a small gathering.
Edith, apparently, did not have quite the force of Wilburs imaginary cue ball; when she read her poems, according to The Crimson, her voice was nearly inaudible and her poems dicult to
grasp. Wilbur was nevertheless enough impressed by what he
knew of her work to want her to think well of his. His friend Jack
Sweeney, the astute and benevolent curator of the Lamont Librarys Poetry Room, presented her with a copy of The Beautiful
Changes after she expressed interest in Wilburs work. In his notebook Wilbur recorded pleasure but also apprehension, wishing
hed been able to tear out many of its pages.
Wilbur found, almost daily, quiet and congenial moments to
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chat about the literary goings on in town at Groliers, a few doors

up from 22 Plympton Street toward Massachusetts Avenue, then
as now a lively street of shops, bookstores, bistros, and restaurants.
Gordon Cairnie had founded the Grolier Poetry Bookstore in 1927
to bring the worlds poetry ancient, modern, and just published,
in English or translation to Cambridges considerable community of poets and poetry readers. Cairnies easygoing and trusting
nature sometimes led him to ask a browser to mind the tiny shop
for a few minutes so he could run an errand. On at least one
occasion he failed to return in time to close up. There was plenty
going on for Wilbur and Cairnie to discuss. Auden and Spender
had settled in America just after the European war began, much to
the disgust of their blitzed countrymen; Robert Lowell was living
in his native Boston and about to publish Lord Wearys Castle,
which won him a Pulitzer Prize at age twenty-eight; and rumors
circulated that Dylan Thomas would come from Wales to read the
poems that already impressed America. The Groliers premises
havent much changed in seventy years: the poets couch is still in
place, and theres room for twenty at most to comfortably browse
among its several thousand books.
Although many of the eras poets called Boston and environs
home, and Harvard hosted its share of lively readings, New York
was still the center of the publishing world. The brass ring for poets
submitting individual poems was in those days The New Yorker;
the magazine had only recently begun to publish more serious
poets as well as scintillating light verse by Ogden Nash, Dorothy
Parker, Phyllis McGinley, and Walker Gibson. The brisk send-o
Louise Bogan had given The Beautiful Changes in The New Yorker
encouraged Wilbur to submit Museum Piece, inspired by an
anecdote he came across while researching Degass life and work.
The novelist Peter De Vries, who was the magazines poetry editor
at the time, recommended its publication to Katherine White. She
raised no initial objections. But when she passed the poem on to the
magazines last line of defense against inaccuracy and infelicity, its
fact checkers, they raised red ags. Wilbur had abbreviated, for
rhymes sake, the painter Henri Toulouse-Lautrecs full name to
Toulouse. The New Yorkers checkers, unsympathetic to the emphatic rhyme Wilbur thus achieved, insisted that the artists preferred short form for his name was Lautrec. They were condent
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that Wilbur could nd an alternative rhyme that clicked with Lautrec. But from the fact squads point of view, Toulouse was the
least of the problems. They also indicted the poems nal image.
Museum Piece
The good gray guardians of art
Patrol the halls on spongy shoes,
Impartially protective, though
Perhaps suspicious of Toulouse.
Here dozes one against the wall,
Disposed upon a funeral chair.
A Degas dancer pirouettes
Upon the parting of his hair.
See how she spins! The grace is there,
But strain as well is plain to see.
Degas loved the two together:
Beauty joined to energy.
Edgar Degas purchased once
A ne El Greco, which he kept
Against the wall beside his bed
To hang his pants on while he slept.
No one at The New Yorker could document that Degas hung his
trousers on an El Greco painting that stood near his bed. Here is
how De Vries framed the issue for Wilbur: The New Yorker had
from its inception a policy of never printing anything as fact that
it could not document and thus remain immune to criticism.
Wilbur dropped everything and tried to establish that his image
was indeed solidly factual. He answered De Vries:

The business about Degass hanging his clothes on an El

Greco does not appear in the Valerie, Bullard, Lafond or any
of the compendia of Degas anecdote. However, it appears to
belong to the oral tradition. In the course of trying to discover the source of the anecdote I have run across people who
have heard the story. Ms. Agnes Mongan, a Degas
expert[,] does not know the origin of the story, but thinks it
is highly probable, and characteristic of the man. Lafonds
Degas (I, P. 94, P. 118) gives some circumstantial evidence:
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two Grecos, did have pictures against his bedroom wall, and
used to ing his clothes at the servant Zoe, which argues he
didnt hang them up in a closet from a seated position in bed.
No one to whom I have spoken has attributed the story to, or
thought [it] more characteristic of, another painter. Another
Degas expert, Mr. John Ringwald, contributed this: Unfortunately I am not able to conrm the truth of your Degas
anecdote, of which I have never heard before. However,
Degas did own two paintings by El Greco, may have kept one
in his bedroom, and was almost blind during the last ten
years of his life. I cannot see why your publishers would not
allow you some poetic license.
Wilbur added: The defense rests. Any defense, however, that
invoked poetic license was unlikely to carry weight chez The
New Yorker. Its editors did, however, try to badger him into ruining the poem. They proposed, to keep this story in the realm of
hearsay, to admit that it might be apocryphal, and suggested
changing Wilburs line Edgar Degas purchased once to its said
that Degas once possessed. Wilbur stood his ground. My reasons
are poetic. I think that to remove the abruptness of Edgar Degas
purchased once would greatly injure the subtlety of the sequence
of associations which constitute the poem. I have, of course, no
interest in perpetrating a minor anecdotal fraud; but I think this
use of a highly probable anecdote entirely justiable poetically.
After somewhat recklessly implying that anyone who disagreed
that poetic truth trumped literal fact was mad, Wilbur ended his
brief with the following sentence: I hope that you will not nd
my disinclination to change the poem to be unreasonable. The
New Yorker editors did nd it unreasonable and returned the
poem, which Poetry magazine was happy to publish immediately,
along with six others by Wilbur. And in good time Wilbur found
documentation in Randall Jarrells library that entirely supported
the fact that Edgar Degas nightly hung his trousers on one of his
two El Grecos.

Wilbur began the summer of 1947 relieved of academic duty; his

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ter, left him with no dissertation research to occupy him and no

Ph.D. requirements to complete. In early September the Wilburs
and four other couples rented a many-bedroom, shingled-style
summerhouse on Cape Cod near Cahoon Hollow Beach in Welleet. When John Brinnin and his companion Bill Read arrived
from Nantucket, they walked fully clothed onto the beach to nd
most of their friends in the bu, in the surf. Brinnin recorded
Charlees welcome in his journal: Look at Dicks white ass! He
went on to comment how the nymphs and satyrs in the quicksilver tide of Welleet harbor were too busy to pay attention. In
the poem Five Women Bathing in Moonlight, Wilbur remains
an observer of the event.
The bathers whitely come and stand.
Water diuses them, their hair
Like seaweed slurs their shoulders, and
Their voices in the moonstrung air
Go plucked of words. Now standing where
The moons misprision salves them inTo silver, they are unaware
How lost they are when they begin
To mix with water, making then
Gestures of blithe obedience,
As ve Danilovas within
The soft compulsions of their dance.
After the publication of The Beautiful Changes later in September,
the critical acclaim that followed, and the appearance of many
newer poems in national magazines including The New Yorker,
few doubted Wilburs poetry to be a calling that deserved his
major attention. The faculty member who presided over the Society of Fellows, the historian Crane Brinton, took Wilbur aside to
assure him that he need not feel obligated to justify his election to
the Society by a focus on scholarship. He should live the life of a
poet; he should write. Thus encouraged, Wilbur did just that,
receiving permission from the Senior Fellows to travel to France
for three months during the spring semester of 1948.
Andr du Bouchet knew that the Wilburs would thrive in Paris.
So did Stanley and Eileen Geist, friends who had left Cambridge
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in August 1947 to tour Europe but found postwar Paris so stimulating and inexpensive that they settled there. When Dick and Charlee arrived on the Mauritania in April 1948, the Geists introduced
them to the pleasures and personalities of Paris, including its
bistros and easygoing lifestyle. Charlee, pregnant but not due until
October, intended to enjoy herself; after a night at the Bal Ngre
she wrote: It is a truly fantastic place where the music is hot
Negro jazz with a Martinique twist and causes immediate madness in all who listen. One dances naturally with excellent Senegalese and West Indian Negroes. We stayed until 3 AM and I
danced myself silly with no one latching to the fact that I was
pregnant: a triumph that I am being a perfect shit about.
Paris was an exhilarating and instructive experience for the
Wilburs. What impressed them most was not the artistic avantgarde though they met many of its major gures but the
peaceful and dedicated atmosphere in which all the poets, novelists, and visual artists they met seemed to live and work. They did
not nd, or engage, in the political and philosophical conict that
cultural historians associate with postwar Paris. It was this serious
serenity that most pleased them about the city. But Pariss most
enduring inuences on Wilbur, though he would not realize their
importance until four years later, were the productions of Molire
he witnessed at the Comdie-Franaise.
Through the Geists, the Wilburs soon met the sculptor Alberto
Giacometti and the artist Jean Hlion, who lent Wilbur his guitar.
At parties Wilbur was easily persuaded to strum and sing. He
favored the blues, a genre he heard often during two summers
riding the rails as a college student during the Depression, spending nights at encampments of tramps and wayfaring families.
Hlions style was eclectic, most often combining early-twentieth-century gurative with surrealistic situations for example,
a bespectacled man on a sidewalk reads a newspaper while on a
nearby mattress a naked and despondent woman suers. Pierre
Schneider (an art historian who was inducted as a Junior Fellow in
the same cohort as Wilbur) and du Bouchet provided contacts not
only to other American expatriates but to practicing French poets,
artists, and the editor of Transition, an avant-garde magazine, who
commissioned Wilbur to translate two French poems by Henri
Pichette titled Apome 1 and Apome 2.
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Before translating these long and spirited neo-Dada diusions

into English verse, Wilbur wrote them out in deadpan prose, of
which the following is an example: We who were, apparently,
perpetually at the mercy of luxury, derived from the spectacle of
general misery a precise notion of prices. Standardized, men made
sacrices to altitude. Poetry, ordinarily esoteric, became the record
of the people, and was restored to its place among the necessaries
of emigrs and aborigines. The entire poem is an energetic eort
to play the sublimity of poetry o against the mundane pleasures
and trappings of bourgeois and country life. Wilburs version
of Apome 1 was published in the magazine, but Apome 2
was not.
Paris oered potential subjects in every direction from the Wilburs hotel, the dIsly on rue Jacob. The March aux Oiseaux inspired a poem with that title which celebrated the colorful, exotic,
melodious, and grounded creatures sentenced to life imprisonment
by their selsh purchasers, for whom Wilbur unleashed in the
poems last quatrain his full-throated scorn:
We love the small, said Burke. And if the small
Be not yet small enough, why then by Hell
Well cramp it till it knows but how to feed,
And well provide the water and the seed.
It was the rst of two animal rights poems he wrote in France.
In Giacometti, a poem written after he visited the sculptor in
his studio, Wilbur captured and elaborated the importance of the
artists vision, conveyed through his rough-textured and emaciated gures. He believed that Giacometti intended to contrast
these with the hulking statues of horizon-eyed, rock-ribbed,
clenched-faced French military heroes and politicians stationed
around Paris. Giacomettis scaried and suering people soon
went striding into the modern consciousness.
Giacometti was the kind of longer meditative poem Wilbur
was eager to try his hand at. It improved on his earlier Water
Walker and pregured Walking to Sleep, The Mind-Reader,
and Lying. It introduces readers to Giacomettis sculptures by
walking them down a street in Paris to the sculptors studio. In the
lines below, which begin about halfway through the poem, Wilbur
is intent on sharing his appreciation of whats inside:
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Follow along this street

(Where rock recovers carven eye and hand),
Open the gate, and cross the narrow yard
And look where Giacometti in a room
Dim as a cave of the sea, has built the man
We are, and made him walk:
Towering like a thin
Coral, out of a reef of plaster chalk,
This is the single form we can assume.
We are this man unspeakably alone
Yet stripped of the singular utterly, shaved and scraped
Of all but being there,
Whose fullness is escaped
Like a burst balloons: no nakedness so bare
As esh gone in inquiring of the bone.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
No prince and no Leviathan, he is made
Of innite farewells. Oh never more
Diminished, nonetheless
Embodied here, we are
The starless walker, one who cannot guess
His will, his keel his noses bony blade.
Though Wilbur explicates what he believes is Giacomettis vision of contemporary humanity in the post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima era, and speaks of the result via a collective we, it is unlikely that he thought of himself or Charlee as alienated from their
own path through life. In fact, while Wilbur and Charlee were relaxing in Grasse, visiting their new artist friends the Springers, he
came to a decision about some important aspects of his life, which
he explained in a letter to Tom Wilcox that Tom read as his friends
betrayal of arts serious moral purpose. The following passage offended Wilcox the most:
I nd that the most salutary eect of Europe is instant dissipation of ambition. One does only what one enjoys, and as a
consequence everything done is done better. We go on reading
and writing things like regular Cambridge people, but there
is no moral stress involved in deciding not to do a damned
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thing for a while. For example it was terribly easy to leave

Paris last week and take the train to Grasse, near Cannes[,]
where we are now living in a pension which overlooks a great
wide valley full of farms, rivers, olive groves, roads, villas,
little bridges, and several centuries accumulated silence. The
pension is, in a rural way, palatial, and it may interest you to
know that for 2 rooms and 3 meals a day (with baths, aperitifs,
breakfast in bed and so on thrown in) we pay a daily bill of
$3.05. We have some friends here who paint and engrave, and
we read in bed or on the terrace part of the day and then when
its good and sunny we hike over to their place for coee and
cake and attempted French conversation.
What struck both Wilburs about the attitudes of the Parisian
artists and intellectuals they met was their easygoingness. A remark in a letter Charlee wrote to Tom Wilcox must also have
rankled: The real miracle of being here for me consists in the
utter relaxation that not only pervades our conscious moments but
[is] very apparently present in each person inhabiting Paris. . . .
There is a complete lack of a Success Drive. No one gives a goddam
about accomplishing anything material or tangible for either his
own satisfaction or that of the world. Charlee went on to announce (probably to Toms further annoyance) that she and Dick
rarely dressed or left their room before noon, and that their rst
meal would be at a little Alsatian restaurant around the corner:
Today we had delicious pat, calves liver done to a turn with
sauted new potatoes, fresh tomato salad, Mousse Chocolat with
real whipped cream and coee with cream and sugar. This lunch
(for both), including a half bottle of wine, cost less than a dollar.
When Wilbur got down to defending his and Charlees altered
set of values and intentions in a letter written to Tom and Darlene
not long before their return to the States, he did so at length.
I have thrust the tray out into the hall, and return to the sheets
to try to dignify the remarks which Thos. found disquieting in
my last letter, and which, since I wrote them from Grasse,
doubtless were tinged with an unpersuasive sunny insouciance. I think one thing I said was that artistic and intellectual
life here is better, more satisfying, more respected by the
community. Painters are expected to give most of their time to
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painting, scholars to study, writers to writing. And a strikingly

high % of the population is interested in intellectual products,
or, if not interested, respectful. One does not have to be a Great
intellectual or artist to be respected: merely to be capable of
honestly pursuing those vocations entitles one to the respect
of the grocer on the corner. No need to point out that this is not
so in America, and that the American intellectual is always
worrying about whether teaching is action or painting abstractions is social involvement. The general suspicion of
the intellectual in America leads him to self-suspicion. . . .
Tom . . . wonders whether too-concentrated pursuit of [ones]
own concerns is not narcissism, and whether he had not better balance his existence between masturbation and sexual
forays by forcibly estranging himself from his work in the
direction of political engagement or what-not. We have come
a long way from Michelangelo and Sir Philip Sidney, and a
sad way down, if we regret the pursuit of self-realization in art
as a bad adolescent habit, if we who ought to have a certain
reverence for and pride in the intellectual and artistic ability,
fear that too much study or too much art is a dubious indulgence. Art as a substitute for life, or for sex, art as a hypocritical substitute for problems one cannot resolve on the real,
social plane of beans and taxes and love if I thought that Id
quit this minute and go work for Young & Rubicam, or perhaps
for the Communist party. But I dont think that. I think that for
the intellectual or artist the true and inevitable tension is not
that between art and life, but between artist and art.
A painter said to us yesterday that it took a hell of a lot
more willpower to be a painter than to be a soldier or a
dictator. Clearly he was not thinking of art as a soft indulgence, but as the most manly of callings. I think he was right,
and particularly about himself. This painter stands in front of
an easel six days a week trying to do something vital and
perfect, with no judgment but his own to appeal to. He has
broken with every art movement here, is doing something
new all on his own. This is hard, lonely and satisfying work,
it is work for meaning and against meaninglessness, brings
something out of nothing, using all ones invention, honesty,
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concentration and endurance against the historic enemy of

the race: chaos, nonbeing, inertia, absence, whatever you
want to call the contrary of form, being, energy, meaning.
You dont masturbate six days a week all day; let the sexridden and giggly talk about Henry James and his Wand,
you know the process of creation is not passive reverie but
active, primitive, magical, erotic exasperating and male. In
my last letter I said with approval that artists here go quietly
and work in the country: if art is self-abuse, this is contemptible, but if art is the most willful human activity this is
admirable: it means cutting yourself o from all possible
escapes from the confrontation of the diculties of your art.
If you were failing to paint what you wanted to paint, would
the arrival of a summons to go picket the Rumanian embassy
be a blessing, an invitation to life, or a temptation to cowardice? It is harder to paint a picture than to picket, and an artist
who does too much picketing is a weak man or he is merely a
dabbler in art and is no artist at all.
An artists engagement with (versus isolation from) the world
remained Wilburs ongoing concern. In his long poem Castles
and Distances, the central symbol is a chateau in the Loire Valley
where aristocrats and their pack of hounds may indulge their
blood sport: Those palaces of hunting lords, the ground planned /
as ruled reaches, always with a view / Down tapered aisles of trees
at last to fade / In the worlds mass. In this isolated enclave those
tapered aisles work like an escape hatch, exerting a pull toward a
world beyond the castles brutish lifestyle. This geographically
wide-ranging poem begins with a historical event: an explorer
brings back a walrus spared from his killing party and presents it
as an exotic curiosity to James II of England. The walrus amuses
the courtiers but soon dies. The hunting lords who kneel over
the walrus regret the beastly pain . . . with wishes to atone.
Wilbur chides imagined voyeurs (us) for not feeling the walruss
hurt as keenly:
So strangeness gently steels
Us and curiosity kills, keeping us cool to go
Sail with the hunters unseen to the walrus rock
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And stand behind their slaughter: which of us feels

The harpoons hurt and the huge shock
When the blood jumps to ow?
Wilbur shoots irony through this stanza by combining an oxymoron that is also a pun (gently steels us) with a judgmental
allusion to an adage (curiosity kills). In the rst image we fall
prey to our objectifying fascinations; in the second such fascination makes us the predator. Both images reverse our normal association with what it means to be the victim. The poet and his
readers us stand behind the walrus killer. Were implicated. The aristocrats in charge dont really want to relinquish
their privileges, the poem implies, or when they do, its only shortlived whim. Ironically, during the same few months Wilbur was
arguing with Wilcox about a poets necessity to avoid political
distractions, he writes a poem focused on the cruelties and evasions of the rich.
Soon after Dick wrote his personal manifesto to Tom, the Wilburs boarded the Mauritania in Cherbourg and by mid-June had
rejoined four-year-old Ellen, who was staying with Dicks parents
in New Jersey. It was perhaps during this visit to the home of his
youth a gentlemans farm owned by a wealthy expatriate named
Armitage, who clustered around him friends (the elder Wilburs
among them) and family members in various rental or property
sale arrangements that Helen Pigeon, one of the Armitage set,
organized an outdoor poetry reading for Wilbur on her lawn across
the road. Wilbur remembers that he read among other poems a
new one that had a political undercurrent, though it was far from
agitprop. Tears, which he published in a periodical but never in
any of his books, suggests that he was still conscious of class dierences, and in this setting more acutely so, since his parents, though
comfortable nancially, were not as well o as their neighbors.
Whatever its minor poetic deciencies, Tears marks an advance
in the way he framed a potentially controversial and unwieldy
subject: class antagonism. Tears catalogues the deprivations and
suerings of the rich, of which they may be wholly unaware:
O sacricial beauty of the rich:
We see them in the glare beneath marquees,
The straight old men with scalloped sculls who bear
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The Atlas weight of eighty years of ease,

And freighted ladies palely bending there,
Bejeweled as with ies a Lybian lich [corpse].
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The young, who dread to die in grannys bed,
Or softly after brandy in a chair,
Are thrown from thoroughbreds, or run away
As missing heiresses, to anywhere,
Or crashing in a custom-built coup
Are pyred in frying metal, wealthy dead.
Pale porters of our wealth, who may not see
The least magnicence with grateful eye,
O takers of our ease, sad spenders whom
The world can tease but never satisfy,
I wish you other lives beyond the tomb,
Of hunger, loss and sweet anxiety.
Wilbur remembers that reading it failed to upset his moneyed
neighbors; they would be telling themselves, with much truth,
that they werent that kind of rich, and isnt the Wilbur boy a
wonder?

On 5 November 1948, Wilbur headed to a poetry conference at

Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The conference marked the rst time outside Cambridge that Wilbur was
recognized at a public event as a rising talent in his generation of
poets. More important, the younger poets it brought together,
most of them early in their careers, recognized that they had a lot
in common. Invitees to the conference were William Carlos Williams, Richard Eberhart, Kenneth Rexroth, Elizabeth Bishop,
Lloyd Frankenberg, Jean Garrigue, and Robert Lowell. Also present were James Merrill and Joseph Summers, who were teaching
at Bard, and Elizabeth Hardwick, who was beginning a relationship with Lowell. Several of the poets wrote brief recollections of
the conferences more memorable moments. Rexroth was the odd
man out, calling attention to himself by wearing a red shirt and
yellow suspenders, picking ghts with as many of the other poets
who were up for it, and insisting that everyone but William Carlos
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Williams was an eete eastern snob. On one night he granted the

snobs some peace by persuading three of the prettiest undergraduates to spend the evening with him in a cemetery.
The keynoter was Williams, who talked, according to Bishop, in
a completely scatterbrained way. Once formal presentations and
discussion ended, however, the poets gathered in a room without an
audience and gradually coaxed one another to read their poems.
Theory vanished and live poetry took over. Only Bishop demurred
when asked to read, but Lowell gallantly stepped in to read The
Fish, one of her best. One candid photo taken at the conference
shows Lowell looking directly at Bishop, his eyes ablaze. Over the
two days the participants reached a general agreement: that most
of the invited poets were new formalists and had given form new
energy; that they appreciated one anothers poetry and that it was
mostly terric; and that most of them drank too much. This last
realization was tested and conrmed by a brutal concoction that
began with a gallon of wine proofed up with a fth of whiskey, its
potency camouaged with herbs, berries, spices, and nuts. The
nished product was called Glgg. The hot, steamy room in which
the drink was served and the concentrated conviviality of the people in it did the rest. Bishop remembered that she and Hardwick
helped an unsteady Lowell from the haymaking punchbowl to his
room. She also remembered that after Lowell loosened his tie and
shirt, Hardwick commented, Why, hes an Adonis! Writing to
Wilbur a few weeks after the conference, Bishop acknowledged its
intensity and her own preference for solitude. The pace established by Bard seems never to have let up, and I can hardly wait to
get away to Key West and oat in the ocean for days on end. The
lasting legacy of the Bard conference lived on beyond its anecdotes
of conict and intoxication through the enhanced self-condence
that a group conferred on each of its members.
In the late 1940s Wilbur, May Sarton, Richard Eberhart, John
Ciardi, and John Holmes formed a group to read (monthly, for
three winters, at each others houses) and critique their own new
work. In 1962, just three months before his death, Holmes sent
Wilbur a twenty-page narrative poem celebrating the poets of his
generation. Its rst stanza stated four rules that the group of ve
agreed to: . . . copies for all: / Whiskey: food to go with it: and the
poem. The poem.
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Good God bless all such big long bickering nights

Among the cheeses and bottles, coee and carbon copies,
In Medford or Cambridge or Nashville or Chicago!
The fact is everything we read is in our books,
Our best poems. If those confrontations were painful,
Rowdy, sometimes the re of bloom and absolute,
We couldnt hear a clank of armor some of us wore.
Or see which came naked or afraid, but it was so.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
No bruising Wilbur. Whatever he read he stunned us,
In that clear clipped rhythmic our youngers imitate.
His poems were his polished pleasure, and ours,
And literally they brought the world up from dark . . .
Wilbur always wrote arresting, pleasing, and insightful prose.
But until the late 1940s its chief virtues were wit, irony, and
understatement. During his time in the Society of Fellows when
he had no one to answer to, and was given permission to relinquish
scholarly publication his critical prose became assertive and
showed him on occasion keen to demolish his opponents arguments, while continuing to value their accomplishments. This
honing of his tone and prose style came about as he sought to
articulate what good poetry demanded and how to write it. The
Bard Poetry Conferences clash of convictions presented a chance
for Wilbur to assert his own at a moment when a poet he revered,
William Carlos Williams, was disparaging them.
The Bard conference had opened with sessions in which each
poet laid out his or her poetic principles. Louise Bogan began by
making a somewhat defensive case for formalism. Williams came
next, insisting (the new formalists thought unconvincingly) that
free verse was the only truly American way of writing poetry. Lowell, Eberhart, Bishop, Bogan, Garrigue, and Wilbur felt themselves
under attack. There followed throughout the weekend, Wilbur remembers, a knock-down discussion of poetic form. The most telling blows landed were not counterarguments but the poems they
read to each other. Wilbur picked up Williamss gauntlet when
asked by Theodore Weiss to argue the formalist position for an issue
of The Quarterly Review of Literature, which he had just founded
at Bard. Wilburs riposte, sassily titled (when nally published in
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1953) The Bottles Become New, Too, was privately circulated,

and Williams received a copy. (The title plays on a poetic manifesto
in favor of formal verse that Wilbur published in 1950, The Genie
in the Bottle, in which he concluded that the strength of the
genie comes of his being conned in a bottle.)
Wilbur began his response to Williams by praising him, not
faintly, but by correctly linking Williamss theoretical narrowmindedness to his poetic mastery: What I like about Dr. Williamss talk [is that its] unsatisfactory in an inspiring way. . . . Dr.
Williams is not incoherent, but he is certainly eccentric. There is
authority in what he says, not because what he says makes perfect
sense, but [because] this is the sort of lopsided view of literature a
real poet might have to have. Wilbur then goes on to admit that
to write good poetry in ones own era involves rejecting other
ways of writing, past and present. In a contemporaneous set of
unpublished notes Wilbur had done that very thing, listing what
he didnt like about poets whose best work he admired: I incline
to mistrust saeva [savage] indignation, facile despair, and the humorlessly vatic; in Hopkins I dislike the hysteria and the feminine
love of thewy words; in Emily Dickinson I am repelled by the little tippler bit. . . . In Yeats, much as I like him, I often hear the
voice of a timid incredulous man making great fakes of rage,
burning and all that; in Dylan Thomas I mistrust the sentimentalism and the moral emptiness dressed up as Vitalism. In Pound I
dislike the autodidacts urgent pedantry (Faire la poesie nest pas
collaisions) & the emotional thinness. These very qualities, under
other names, please some people.
Wilbur does not praise formal poets or those with well-established coherences indiscriminately. For instance: How often you
see a poet fashion, out of a genuine interaction with the world, a
personal system of imagery, and then slowly retire within it, praised
by some for having integrated his vision, but deplored by others for
having gone unspeakably stale. . . . Poets cant aord to forget that
there is a reality which survives all orders great and small. Things
are. The cow is there. No poetry can have any strength unless it
continually bashes itself against the reality of things. Reality, he
insists, remains for all successful poets the source of their poetry and
the shape-shifter that defeats them.
When Wilbur asserts the advantages of formal verse, he insists
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that iambic pentameter, because it can absorb the full range of

speech rhythms, is a superior medium for rendering the way people talk than free verse, which has nothing so substantial with
which to accent its ow. After noting the early origins of the
sonnet and terza rima, he ends his essay with this statement: I
have seen sonnets, villanelles, inversions, and all that Dr. Williams
reprehends do great services in the last few years, and when this is
so, one cannot say that the poets have surrendered to traditional
forms. They have taken them over, rather. Likeminded formalists
embraced Wilburs rhetorical knockout of Williams, but, whether
burdened or liberated by their allegiance to free verse, Williams
and his successors may still prevail when the contest is waged over
the value of the poetry itself.
Critics who think Wilbur hog ties himself with rhymes, pentameters, intricate stanzas, and allegiance to tradition may be
surprised to read the essays in which he talks about his own process of writing poems. Spontaneous is a word he often includes in
these discussions. One of his unpublished meditations begins:
Rhyme works as words work in dreams. He goes on to argue that
to nd vivid rhyming phrases that advance a poem, poets need to
troll their subconscious to bring to the surface connections and
realities of which they werent consciously aware. The value he
placed on associative powers reinforced the way he thought and
wrote in prose about poetic inspiration. The writing of a poem
always passed through various stages of uncertainty and struggle.
If a poet begins with a conviction, or in full possession of an
argument, the poem produced will not have much surprise or
original insight.

Harvards inuence on Wilburs academic and creative future took

many forms, some of them fortuitous, and many quite complex. For
instance, by studying with and later assisting the critic I. A. Richards, one of the most formidable of the mid-twentieth century, Wilbur used his familiarity with close analysis of a works organization
and texture in his analysis of Degass paintings and drawings for
Frederick Deknatel. Richardss mode of close analysis also helped
Wilbur to shape his later thinking about Edgar Allan Poe, whose
stories he had rst read in an Armed Services edition in February
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1944 while in a foxhole beneath Monte Cassino. (Wilbur never took

a course in Poe at Harvard, though in fall 1949 he taught one, a
graduate seminar that attracted eight students.)
Over several years Wilbur devoted himself to a study of Poes
life and works, developing an interpretation of Poes cosmic vision
that he published in a series of essays and which proved original
and persuasive enough to become widely accepted by Poe scholars.
(Poes stories engaged him more than Poes verse, which but for a
few poems Wilbur thought overwrought and overrated.) Wilbur
recognized the extreme nature of Poes cosmic vision and its fusion
with his role as a poet: The universe, as Poe conceives it, is a
poetic or artistic creation. . . . It has come about through Gods
breaking up of His original unity [via] His self-radiation into
space. . . . [Now His creatures] must by some counter impulse,
restore the original sense of things. And only poets, Poe assumed,
can accomplish this mighty task.
Wilburs study of Poes metaphysics may have helped clarify his
own religious thinking. Though he had always considered himself
an Episcopalian, he wasnt sure which of its thirty-nine articles he
believed. Though the poems he wrote during the early 1950s
involved Christian themes, he never presented his Christian belief
as a given, nor did he express it fervently. Instead he used technical
terminology and concepts of botany, zoology, physics, and astronomy to explore the Christian universe.
Wilburs Amherst professor Theodore Baird had been pressing
him since his rst semester at Harvard to write his impressions of
the formidable I. A. Richards. Wilbur did not weigh in on Richards until after he had both taken a course with him and served as
his teaching assistant (in 1947) in Richardss inuential introductory course, General Education A. Bairds interest was keen; he
had learned of Richardss methodology while a student at Harvard
and had incorporated it into his own courses in composition and
criticism. Wilburs letter opens with a pastiche of a famous passage
from Eliots Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
No! I am not Prof. Richards, nor was meant to be;
Am an assistant prof, one that will do
To mark the papers, take a class or two,
Advise the Prof; a useful tool, I hope,
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Politic, cautious, fearful of derision,

Absorbtive of the things my betters say,
A novice of the grand synthetic vision
Who feels, at times, decidedly born
[of limited intelligence]
Almost, at times, a dope.
Wilburs delay in assessing Richards and his resort to the obliqueness of looking at him (via parody) from the viewpoint of a dispirited subordinate resulted from his being much puzzled by
him even though he had watched Richards teaching a class twice a
week for at least two semesters. Further complicating the matter
were Richardss detachment and his preference for being alone
whenever possible. (He told Wilbur he liked to climb mountains
because one feels so alone.) Always wary of romantic claustrophobia, Richards fell in love with a woman he rst met as they arrived
on top of the same mountain.
Wilburs surprising criticism of Richards was his failure to
communicate. Richardss lectures on Western intellectual history
had an admirable coherence in Wilburs view, but only by straining my brains to remain on his level of abstraction . . . can [I]
understand him. [Then] I am aware of immense jellings. But,
Wilbur continued, Richardss freshmen are much of the time
entirely baed, and R does not perceive this. . . . In other words . . .
Richards is in dead earnest about the Platonic-Coleridgian arrangement of ideas which is the essence of the course, [but] frivolously unconcerned about imparting it.
Wilburs negative critique of a man he otherwise (that is, when
not teaching freshmen) thought wondrous and fascinating to
work with identies by implication some of the positive characteristics he adopted in his own teaching and writing: What
bothers me about Richards is that he too seldom speaks in instances and examples, but rather presents his hearers with the
abstract end-products of his thought, and connections between
those products: a proceeding which contradicts his own theory of
education, and his & Aristotles account of the formation of universals. Wilburs poems, starting with those he wrote when he was
seven, attest to his way of accumulating instances on the way to
arriving at universals. Also implicit is Wilburs attachment to
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the things of this world, part of a phrase he borrowed from St.

Augustine for the poem Love Calls Us to the Things of This
World, which became identied with his entire poetic oeuvre.
But during the years he was at Harvard, he was also strongly
attracted to a platonic metaphysics that claimed superiority over
the unstable world outside his mind. In the poem, A World
without Things Is a Sensible Emptiness, however, he rejected
this view decisively as a mental desert, declaring that the visible
world glows with spiritual satisfaction. The poems last four lines
read: Wisely watch for the sight / Of the supernova burgeoning
over the barn, / Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts, the
spirits right / Oasis, light incarnate. The poems he wrote after
arriving in Rome in September 1954 develop this revelation within the context of the citys art and history.
Wilbur never studied with Robert Frost, who resigned from his
teaching post at Amherst before Wilbur arrived as a freshman in
fall 1938, but when Wilbur came to Harvard in 1946, Frost lived in
Cambridge at 38 Brewster Street. The Wilburs developed a lasting
friendship with Frost that had its origins not only in Wilburs
early promise as a poet but in the role Charlees grandfather
William Hayes Ward and her great-aunt Susan Hayes Ward had
played in furthering Frosts literary career. The magazine they
edited, the New Yorkbased Independent, was the rst national
magazine to publish Frosts poetry. And Frost so admired
Susan Hayes Ward that he had written Wild Grapes at her
insistence: she persuaded him that he should remember the
ladies by writing a female counterpart to Birches.
The Wilburs spent many evenings sitting literally at Frosts feet
on his living room oor. Having memorized a prodigious amount
of Frosts poetry, Wilbur would recite Frosts poems back to him in
this congenial setting. As the Wilburs became regular visitors,
they ceased to sit on the carpet and continued the friendship on an
equal footing. Frost, out of interest or his instinctive competitiveness, kept abreast of current poetry. One day in 1947 he praised
Wilburs somewhat mysterious poem The Puritans, which had
just appeared in The Advocate. Since the poem is a parable with an
unstated subject, Wilbur began to explain to Frost that it was
about religious zealots who commit the very sins they excoriate.
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Frost cut him o, saying, If you explain it I wont like it any

more.
There were other subjects Frost was disinclined to pursue.
Wilbur was reading widely in the poetry of earlier eras, often
nding lesser-known poets he liked well enough to study and
bring to the attention of others. One was the early-nineteenthcentury poet of gloom Thomas Lovell Beddoes. One day a line
from a Beddoes poem jumped out at him, as it will to most reading
this essay. The speaker is a ghost attempting to persuade a living
woman to die so that their souls can become lovers:
Young soul, put o your esh, and come
With me into the quiet tomb;
Our bed is lovely, dark, and sweet;
The earth will swing us, as she goes,
Beneath our coverlid of snows,
And the warm leaden sheet.
Wilbur immediately saw that Frost had appropriated Beddoess
phrasing and transported it to a dierent kind of snowy intimacy,
that of a New Englander attentive to his Morgan horse trying to
interrupt his drivers reverie and get home to the barn:
He gives his harness bell a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sounds the sweep
of easy wind and downy ake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Writing years later about this uncoincidental echo, Wilbur noted
that there is no mention of cold in Frosts poem, and that the
characterizing words are easy, downy, lovely, dark and deep,
words that evoke just such a snowy coverlet and featherbed as
were oered by Beddoess ghostly seducer, and which twice over
oblige Frost to put away the thought of sleep.
During a conversation in the late 1940s Wilbur ohandedly
asked Frost if he was fond of Beddoes. Frost answered that, yes, he
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had read Beddoes. But, Wilbur recalled, he said so with a warning

glitter in his eye, and I did not pursue the subject.
Wilburs extended account of Frost in his Harvard-era notebook
begins with a harsh judgment, and then qualies it: Robert
Frosts conversation is full of malice, & hes a very aggressive man.
His demonstrated integrity balances this, however, and of course
the humor, so that he is delightful to listen to. And there is a
humorous side to Frosts literary jibes and anecdotes as Wilbur
recounts them. But most of the humor in Frosts conversation, as
Wilbur records it, comes from exposing the shortcomings of rival
poets. Frost faulted both Pound and Yeats, for instance, for their
lack of linguistic expertise. Pounds translations were eclectic,
Frost claimed, because he has six trots before him on the table;
Ezra didnt know a conjugation from a declension. Of Yeats, Frost
said, He simply couldnt learn a language. Frost withdrew from
his close association with Pound in England to escape what others
saw as Pounds generosity: his tireless quest for talented poets,
whose work he usually helped rene and then recommended to
magazine editors. Poets Pound helped to publish ran the gamut
from a tyro named Shipwerth Quennell to Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, and T. S. Eliot. Pound had read all three of Frosts
books in manuscript (vurry amurican was his summation) before their publication. Of the poems in North of Boston, Pound
informed Frost: What youre trying to write is the short story.
Mied, Frost distanced himself from Pound so it could not be
claimed that Pound had discovered him and rewritten his poems.
Wilbur took two courses from and worked as a teaching assistant for F. O. Matthiessen, an Americanist whose most inuential
work, American Renaissance, was a study of Emerson, Thoreau,
Hawthorne, Whitman, and Melville, who all published their major works during the early 1850s. The books most signicant
cultural and institutional inuence was the establishment of
American Literature and later American Studies as independent
disciplines, departments, and undergraduate majors. Matty,
a nickname he himself used, had a more personal impact on
Wilbur than other Harvard professors, and Wilbur impressed
Matthiessen as both a poet and a literary scholar. It was
Matthiessens backing, Wilbur believes, that was decisive in
earning him election to the Society of Fellows.
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To Wilburs circle, and many other circles beyond Harvard, Matthiessen was both revered and controversial. His membership in
leftist groups he may or may not have known were Communist
fronts made him a target of anti-Communists. Matthiessen was
universally respected in academia, and his homosexuality was
never an outright issue at Harvard, although the social climate of
the late 1940s was decades away from open acceptance of gays.
When Matthiessen realized that he had fallen in love with a man
twenty years his senior and wanted to live with him, he appealed
for guidance to his Yale cohort in Skull & Bones, asking whether he
should resist or yield to his love. (One custom of Skull & Bones, as
with other Yale senior societies, is a requirement that members
recount their autobiographies and bare their souls to the other
members. So Matthiessens summoning his brethren to help resolve a life crisis well into his thirties is not as strange as it may
seem.) They listened and then gave him their blessing. When Matthiessens partner died in 1945 he was suddenly lonely, and John
Brinnin (for one) knew hed been diagnosed as clinically depressed.
Brinnin, among others, tried and failed to help Matthiessen
nd another partner. A few months after one such introduction,
Matthiessen jumped to his death. Brinnin described his reaction in
his journal:
April 1, 1950. Westport. 7 a.m. Flip on the bedside radio.
Matty a suicide in Boston. A fall from 10th oor of a fourth
rate hotel. On windowsill his Phi Beta Kappa key . . . wristwatch, Skull & Bones insignia.
Phone V. in Poughkeepsie, his rst thought mine: grief
unassuagable. Says reporters will play with contributing
factors . . . anything but truth. Man died of broken heart.
Period.
Matthiessen had accepted an invitation to the Wilburs for the
evening of 1 April. He informed them in a telegram dated at 6:00
a.m. that morning:
taken sick unable to have dinner very sorry
matty
Matthiessens suicide note gave his severe depressions (which he
had endured for ten years after a nervous breakdown caused by
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overwork) as the immediate cause. But his note went on to imply

the rise of McCarthyism and its rabid anti-communism, as well as
the enslavement of Eastern Europe, as secondary causes. Brinnin
was correct in his assumption that the death of Matthiessens
partner Russell Cheney had deepened Matthiessens already severe depression.
Matthiessens life and death were important to Wilbur in several connected respects. Matthiessen was an example of an intellectual for whom politics was central to his sense of himself. His
activism was calibrated but very public and very outspoken. He
was not a Marxist, but he believed American values demanded
socialist governance and distribution of goods and services. He also
believed both critics and artists must be actively concerned with
the major political and social issues of the day.
Wilburs most explicit argument over the responsibilities of the
artist was with Wilcox, and its not surprising he gradually backed
away from the example of outspoken socialism that Matthiessen
had set. He dedicated his second book of poems, Ceremony, published later in 1950, to F.O.M.
Reviewers had responded to The Beautiful Changes in 1947
with appreciative recognition of Wilburs virtues and anticipation
of his next book. Critical reaction to Ceremonys arrival continued
favorable, but many reviewers expressed, not disapproval exactly,
but reservations, in the form of three kinds of exhortation: to
include fewer merely technically impressive poems; to deal with
the grittier and more universal aspects of experience; and to take
more chances. Randall Jarrells review brought up all three perceived weaknesses and became a touchstone for both Wilburs fans
and his detractors and downplayers.
Most of [Wilburs] poetry consents too easily, with innocent
complacency, to its own unnecessary limitations. Once an
unusually reective halfback told me that as a run develops
there will sometimes be a moment when you can settle for
six or eight safe yards, or else take a chance and get stopped
cold or, if youre lucky, go the whole way. Mr. Wilbur almost
always settles for six or eight yards; and so many reviewers
have praised him for this that in his second book he takes
fewer risks than in his rst. . . . I would quote to Mr. Wilbur
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something queer and true that Blake said on the same subject: You never know what is enough unless you know what
is more than enough. Mr. Wilbur never goes too far, but he
never goes far enough. In the most serious sense of the word
he is not a very satisfactory poet. And yet he seems the best of
the quite young poets writing in this country.
About a year before Jarrells review appeared in the Partisan
Review in its NovemberDecember 1951 issue, Wilbur and Jarrell
had spent time together at a poetry conference. In his Cambridge
notebook Wilbur recorded his impression of Jarrell:
[He] has written poetry reviews of the greatest acerbity:
there is none more cutting unless it is Berryman. And yet in
person Jarrell is slow, modest, full of well-I-dont-knows and
boyish ers and ahs. Of course one must look hard at such
people. After two days of quiet talk and deference from
Jarrell I noticed a transient glint in his eye, & for a moment
glimpsed the tomahawk man. The same thing with Marianne Moore, who after an hour of backwatering will tip you
overboard with a sudden self-assertion. These people are
perhaps surest and stubbornest of all. Modesty can be a kind
of self-conservation, a not giving others anything to go on.
Wilbur himself was seldom ready to give others much to go on.
But whats striking about Jarrells review is not the obvious intent
of the tomahawk man to take a scalp but the failure of Jarrell to
cite the poems or the passages where Wilbur was playing it
safe. Other reviewers who wrote retrospective commentaries on
his rst few books, notably Clive James and Robert F. Sayre, implicitly respond to Jarrell by plumbing the depths of Wilburs
poems, both lyric and narrative, instead of announcing from a
levee their shallowness. Jarrells challenge stung, however, and
Wilbur included in his later books longer and more deantly
ambitious poems than he had in Ceremony.

In 1952, Wilbur received a Guggenheim Fellowship to write an

original drama, and the Wilburs moved to Corrales, New Mexico,
in September so that Dick could devote his full energies to the
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project and he and his family could enjoy New Mexicos culture,
climate, and reputation for inspiring artists. They rented part of a
multi-family one-story pueblo, sharing with a family whose descendants had settled the town and given it its ocial name,
Sandoval. Wilbur wrote A Plain Song for Comadre about Bruna
Sandoval, who lived with her son in the pueblo, after watching her
clean the church of San Ysidro from the clay porch to the white
altar. / For love and in all weather, this is what she has done. It is
one of the pre-Rome poems in which Wilbur admits a surge of
Christian feeling into his work: Sometimes the early sun / Shines
as she ings the scrubwater out, with a crash / Of grimy rainbows
and the stained suds ash / Like angel-feathers.
In a letter to his Amherst fraternity brother Rab Brooks, a
former Junior Fellow and currently a classics professor at Harvard,
Wilbur gave a detailed account of life on the edge of the desert
stretching westward, mountains and mesas on the horizon, and
the Rio Grande a few hundreds yards east.
We are established about 10 miles from Albuquerque, now
supposed to be the fastest growing city in the state. There is
considerable ocular evidence to support this contention; I
have never seen any urbs which looked so little urban or
urbane. It sits in what we Easterners would call desert, and
amounts at rst sight to a great wash of neon on either side of
Route 66. Utterly planless; miles of motels, Laundrettes,
Kwik-Kleaners, Ozone Heights developments. The two bits
of the city which seem to reect some taste & leisured planning are the University, beautifully done in southwestern
style, and the old Plaza, a single square of the old town which
the speculators have not been permitted to raze. Fortunately,
however, a ve-minute drive out of town brings one to beautiful country; in most directions to undulant grazing land,
mesas and mountains; in our direction, which is north, to
Spanish American farming country. We live in Sandoval,
more generally called Corrales (because it used to be a mess
of corrals). All houses are small adobes with dirt yards and
great cottonwood trees above & about them; between which
are elds of alfalfa, melons, tomatoes, grapes and chili peppers. At this time of year all the adobe walls are hung with
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great looping chains of ristras of chilis. Hanging over Corrales though actually quite far away is Sandia, or Watermelon Mountain, one of the Sangre de Cristo chain, and this
morning it wears a bit of snow. . . .
As for the dance at Jemez I had expected to see something
quite alien and merely curious, but found it an experience
more overpowering than any high mass could be. Two squads
of dancers, each with its chorus of old men, the rst squad
being the Summer People & stained squash-ower color,
the second the blue Winter People. Behind each male dancer
a woman in dark clothing: the men dance with a pounding
step, alternating feet with the double hop on either; the
women, since they represent the earth-principal, never raise
their feet from the ground, but shue. Men and women are
decked with r balsam boughs; the women wave such
boughs in either hand, the men have rattles.
I suppose that the term corn dance is really a way of saying
fertility dance: there was not much corn in evidence, save on
the rooftops of the adobes along the plaza of the Pueblo, &
dry stalks in the lofts. The dance appears to be nonseasonal or
rather all seasonal, an attempt to embrace the whole cycle of
the year, & so the balsam, being evergreen, seems more appropriate than corn.
Corrales was invigorating, as Wilbur wrote to Brooks, with 10 or
more roosters to hail the dawn, and Wilbur was able to devise a
plausible plot for his original play. But the essential dramatic
momentum, along with interest in conict and character, seemed
to vanish when he began to write dialogue. Charlee, who read
Dicks pages as he completed them, immediately identied the
problem: Dick had created a now habitual voice that dominated
every poem he composed. When trying to invent other voices they
all sounded like his. Consequently, faced with doppelgngers for
dramatis personae, he found it extremely dicult to generate the
palpable conict essential to a play.
Seeking a way out of this impasse, Wilbur thought back to what
had inspired him to try to write plays in the rst place: his and
Charlees enthrallment by the lively Parisian theater, particularly
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pressed them in that postwar era, a Golden Age of French acting

when Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud held the stage.
Since Molires verse dramas were written in rhymed couplets,
and Wilbur had the ability to rhyme with what seemed eortless
felicity, the solution to his impasse appeared obvious: he would
translate Molire. The play that came rst to mind was The Misanthrope, which he had seen with Barrault playing Alceste. Wilbur soon found a French copy of the play in the University of New
Mexicos library in nearby Albuquerque and set to work. He discovered he had both an aptitude for and an immediate pleasure in
the work. Over the course of his life he would translate fteen
plays by French playwrights.
Though Wilbur had been appointed in 1950 to a term of ve
years as the Briggs Copeland Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, he taught for only three. Harvards liberal leave policy had
allowed him to receive a semesters pay while spending a full year
in Corrales when awarded a Guggenheim in 195253, and to take
o his nal year of the Briggs-Copeland appointment when awarded
a Prix de Rome for 195455. On 28 October 1954, he received a
letter from Herschel Baker, the chair of the Harvard English Department, formally announcing that he would not be considered
for a possible permanent appointment. Baker emphasized that this
refusal implied no adverse judgment on Wilburs teaching performance or his ability to get tenure, and he made it clear that Wilburs services had been greatly appreciated and admired.
Baker told Wilbur what he had initially understood when he
was appointed: the English Department had no tenure-track appointments available under Harvards Graustein chart, which stipulated the conditions and the timing of permanent appointments.
The Prix de Rome, however, had already determined Wilburs
immediate future; the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in
conjunction with the American Academy in Rome, had oered
him an initial stipend of $3,500, which was inadequate for a
fellow with a wife and (now three) children. Wilbur asked Archibald MacLeish, a member of the awarding committee of the Academy of Arts and Letters, whether the amount could be supplemented. MacLeish persuaded the Arts and Letters society to add
$1,000 to Wilburs fellowship. (The Wilburs and MacLeishes had
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been friends since MacLeishs appointment to the Boylston Chair

of Poetry and Rhetoric in April 1949.)
Since the Wilburs knew Dick would not be teaching at Harvard
in the academic year 195556 they sold their house in Lincoln
and bought one in Wellesley, where he had been hired to teach at
the college beginning in September 1955. (Wilbur would remain
at Wellesley for two academic years, one semester of which he was
on leave to write lyrics for Candide in collaboration with Leonard
Bernstein and Lillian Hellman, before moving on to Wesleyan.)
Dick, Charlee, and their children, Ellen, Christopher, and
Nathan, arrived in Naples aboard the Cristoforo Columbo in midSeptember, to begin a year in which Wilbur immersed himself in
Roman myth, history, architecture, and religious belief. In Rome
he wrote six of the poems published in his third book, Things of
This World, which would win him both the National Book Award
and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. With hindsight alert to the
religious content of his Roman poems, including For a New Railway Station in Rome, Altitudes, and A Baroque Wall-Fountain
in the Villa Sciarra, its tempting to search for religious intimations in his earlier work. A passage in his Cambridge notebook
suggests he was willing to look more deeply at human existence: I
would hate to believe that there is nothing more to things than I
can perceive.

Robert Bagg wishes to thank Richard Wilbur and Ellen Wilbur for recovering,
and granting him access to, Wilbur family letters and documents, as well as the
archivists who have assisted his research at Amherst College, the University of
Delaware, and Harvard University.

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