Richard Wilbur (Orlando: Harcourt, 2004)

During World War II, Richard Wilbur served at the European battlefields of Cassino and Anzio, and there began to write poetry "in earnest" to seek for order in himself and in the world. Sixty-one years later, this volume anthologizes some of the best of Wilbur's output, his victories of beauty and order. Unlike the 1988 New and Collected Poems, which brought Richard Wilbur his second Pulitzer Prize, the Collected Poems 1943-2004 includes his poetry for children, the song lyrics for Leonard Bernstein's Candide, brilliant translations, recently published poetry, and fifteen previously unpublished poems.

In 1956, Richard Wilbur's second book, Things of This World, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Over the intervening decades, Wilbur's work has become a standard for aspiring poets and a staple of admiring readers. Wilbur's formal poetry addresses a wide range of topics with outstanding technical precision. He is by turns lyrical, playful, rhapsodic, solemn, threnodic, light, noble, scholarly, witty, instructive, allusive, subtle, blunt, and eloquent. Never self-indulgent or self-congratulatory, his poems are sometimes honed to a perfection that renders his prosody transparent, the words riding on a dream of speech. By contrast, in other genres, such as his Moliere translations, his formal metrics drive lucid lines into pennants of their form, and we are aware of his technical presence much as a jet passenger is aware of the enclosing jet's motive force. Wilbur is a strong advocate and singular embodiment of the Western Christian intellectual tradition. His continued presence in American literature is a healthy counterbalance to the influence of the Beat poets, to the more recent "language poets," and to enthusiasts of computer-generated "code work" poetry.

Wilbur often returns to Christian themes, many of which were present in his early poetry. In "Advice to a Prophet," he asks a contemporary prophet not to speak of the death of the human race because "our slow unreckoning hearts will be left behind / unable to fear anything that is too strange." Instead, the prophet should warn us about the loss of our identity as creatures, as part of the created world, and of our responsibility for the creation's stewardship. Without self-pity, we may lose "the singing locust of the soul unshelled / and all we mean or wish to mean."

Through the narrator of "She," Wilbur suggests that Eve was transfigured into human history as desire and imagined action, that Eve, "in time took on the look of every labor and its fruits." Such Christian mythopoetics of the imagination may recall William Blake, but Wilbur resists the Romantic impulse to construct a quasi-Gnostic mythology, and instead grounds his lyricism on the most basic natural images. Wilbur also resists the impulse to construct a secular aesthetic metaphysics of the imagination as Wallace Stevens proposed. Though poems like the magnificent long directive, "Walking to Sleep," show he is well acquainted with Hindu scriptures, Wilbur's primary concern in his poetry, translations, and criticism is Western and Christian, persuaded of Platonic idealism.

In "Someone Talking to Himself," Wilbur declares that "Love is the greatest mercy, / a volley of the sun / which lashes all with shade / that the first day be mended." For Wilbur, love is subject to fallen nature and often tragic, but it is ultimately a blessing requiring us to abide the contradictions innate to embodied ideals. The tragic narrator asks, " / till time be comprehended / and the flawed heart unmade / what can I do but move / from folly to defeat and / call that sorrow sweet / which teaches me to see / the final face of love / in what I cannot be?" As if in answer, "All These Birds," concludes, "Come on, sister, stranger, dove / put on the reins of Love."

Richard Wilbur's Collected Poems 1943-2004 contains some of the finest American poetry of the late twentieth century. This volume offers a lifetime of beauty and interest. It should be in every poetry library.