I think that in free verse one loses all sorts of opportunities for power, emphasis and precision, especially rhythmic precision. If you read the poems of Robert Frost, above all the North of Boston poems, you hear the New England voice speaking in its native rhythm. Because there's a loose iambic pentameter going on, you can't misread those poems. You can't fail to read them as if you were a New Englander. If you put enough stresses into a Robert Frost line to have it be a pentameter, then you're going to have to be making New England cadences. Now if someone attempts a poetry of distinctive speech rhythms without a metrical base, I think a good part of the intended emphasis is going to get away.Exactly. But what of Wilbur’s voice? I hear ornate speech, that of a well-read student, a professor now if you will, writing the poem in the manner that he believes one should write that poem. There is always that remove in his meter. Although technically proficient and wonderfully written. As William Carlos Williams is to have said, “Wilbur is good.” Of course he began that appraisal, “Wilbur is wrong.” I’d add, Wilbur is missing.
But maybe that’s just some postmodern trick and the joke’s on us.
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I'm very much in agreement with you, though I must admit up-front that I've not read much of Wilbur's poetry. I haven't read much because I couldn't wade through it: It's not difficult, per se, but it takes the whole going over, the whole poem to get at the meat, and I don't like the laid-back, distanced development. He seems to have wasted much space merely to develop a form. He added much modification, in the form of added details and metaphors and exposition, and these things always seem to stand in my way. It's almost tedious; but I know, I'm likely missing much in my impatience.
(I have the same problem with some other formalists, worse poets than Wilbur, who expand, expand, modify and describe subjects in a tedious, form-building manner.)
This is my personal impression of the poems I've read, though a few haven't fit the description I've just given. I know some poets swear Wilbur was the greatest formalist since Frost.
Wibur and Anthony Hecht are not just the greatest formalists since Frost; after Frost, they're the greatest American poets of the 20th century, with only Robert Creeley as a possible rival -- and he has their range neither in form nor in material. Nothing in either of them is "for the sake of the form": rather, it is for respect for the force and nuance of experience shaped so as to be made available to the reader and to be beautiful, even if that beauty (especially in Hecht) is sometimes terrifying.
Michael, you forgot Auden on your list of supreme beings! :) I actually enjoy Hecht's poetry more than Wilbur's, but Auden's more than the poems of either of those poets. I've been procrastinating—I've been mulling over a bifurcation in formalism, after the 20th C. Greats, which could be expressed as a post-Frost / post-Auden dichotomy, but I've not yet written the essay.
It isn't so much that Wilbur seems to have padded poems to fill out the requirements of form—a too-common strategy of novices—but that he seems to have often overestimated the expressive power of form or underestimated the limitations of form's expressive power: yes, his poems show a technical mastery of meter and rhyme, but his use of "the force and nuance of experience shaped so as to be made available to the reader" too often seems like an exercise in formalizing descriptive prose rather than a writing of poetry: the poetic nature is there, if one absorbs the totality of the poem, but the movements from A to Z aren't particularly inspired or beautiful.
Well, Curtis, me too. I haven't read much of his stuff, and much for the same reasons as yourself. But I'm reading them with attention now.
Michael, I'm sorry to say just because you say so doesn't make it so. I cannot argue with his technical skills. But Frost he's not. Sometime I think there's a conservative agenda here. This guy's so damned good in the skills department, and his message is mostly an affirming one, that the fact he has no "soul" is necessarily set aside. I think it was Bly who said that American poetry took a wrong turn. He had his particular axe to grind with the modernists. Mine is with the formalistas. They, for the most part, took a wrong turn after Frost. Rather than look to meter and the human voice and its dialectic, they took to wit alone. Show me the classical allusions in Frost. They're few and far between, and when used are used subtly. With Wilbur and his ilk, they're everywhere. But he's not there in his own poems.
Curtis, I was talking only about Americans — but since I excluded Eliot as "really" English, maybe I should have included Auden.
Greg, you're right that my assertions won't get me so much as a Happy Meal at McDonalds. But I wonder why it bothers you that Wilbur's is a cultivated voice — and it certainly is — why such a voice seems to you any less authentic than that of any other persona a poet might choose. Is intimate knowledge of classical literature less authentic than intimate knowledge of punk rock? Is Bukoski's voice more authentic? Or Frost's? Or Rhina Espaillat's? All of them chose their stance toward the world, certainly stances congenial to their natures, but still part of the artifice of their poetry.
David Mason wrote a very fine piece on Wilbur's latest Collected — it's worth reading here.
That's an excellent question Michael, and one I'm struggling with. The best that I've been able to come up with: I think because I feel it's not authentic, that this voice is a pose, and well-learned one no doubt, but nevertheless false, or maybe that's too tough a call: it's not completely honest is all.
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