A Testament To Civility NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS

By Paul Gray

According to Romantic superstition, poets either flame out young or gutter into unheralded old age. A related notion holds that popularity is intrinsically vulgar and hence earned, always, by inferior poems. The facts largely argue against this mythology, and the accomplishments of Richard Wilbur, 67, make it look silly. For more than 40 years, Wilbur has written poetry that garnered both critical acclaim and public recognition, including a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. He has taught at Harvard, Wellesley, Wesleyan and Smith, and generously given foreign authors an English-speaking readership, translating works by, among others, Anna Akhmatova, Jorge Luis Borges, Andrei Voznesensky and Joseph Brodsky. His words have been sung on Broadway, set to Leonard Bernstein's score in the musical Candide (1956). And last fall Wilbur became the second person, after Robert Penn Warren, to assume the title, established by an act of Congress in 1985, of poet laureate of the U.S.

This lustrous career is both summed up and continued in New and Collected Poems, which gathers together all of Wilbur's six previous volumes and introduces 27 new works. Included among these is On Freedom's Ground, a cantata written in collaboration with Composer William Schuman that was performed in New York City in 1986 to mark the Statue of Liberty's 100th birthday. That a serious poet would contribute his skill to a national celebration, throwing well-chosen words into the melee of fireworks, bumper stickers and beer, may seem surprising. Yet Wilbur's poetry has never drawn a sharp distinction between public and private occasions. The job of the poet, his work implies, is to be a messenger between outer and inner worlds, to specify and make memorable what everyone already knows or to give narrow personal experience the breadth of shared impressions. This dedication to communal speech is visible throughout New and Collected Poems, making the book a singular testament to civility.

Wilbur's "Leaving," for example, moves adroitly from the specific to the universal. A couple depart from a garden party at dusk and stumble slowly into a perception of the pageant of humanity:

We saw now, loitering there

Knee-deep in night,

How even the wheeling children

Moved in a rite

Or masque, or long charade

Where we, like these,

Had blundered into grand

Identities,

Filling our selves as sculpture

Fills the stone.

We had not played so surely,

Had we known.

At the other extreme, On Freedom's Ground takes a look at New York harbor as it might have been before it became a beachhead of the New World. The vision is harsh, deterministic, featuring a wind "which blew/ Not as it chose, but as it had to do." The invasion of humanity is hardly the despoliation of paradise: "Where was the thought of freedom then?/ It came ashore within the minds of men."

This view of nature sounds anthropocentric and hence, by most contemporary creeds, hopelessly old-fashioned. But Wilbur's poems always allow the animal and vegetable kingdoms their tumultuous integrity. Their energy is a cause for celebration, and so, equally, is the power of the human mind to absorb, assimilate and assort all these phenomena. "Odd that a thing is most itself when likened," writes Wilbur, extolling the ability of language, metaphors, similes to capture the spectacle of reality. Even then, abstractions can be unsettled by the tug of the here and now. A bluefish swims beneath the sea:

He is a type of coolest intellect,

Or is so to the mind's blue eye until

He strikes and runs unseen beneath the rip,

Yanking imagination back and down

Past recognition to the unlit deep

Yet words prove equal to this primordial plunge. Wilbur's poetry offers, before anything else, the pleasures of craft. "All That Is" conjures an urban evening scene populated by people working on newspaper crossword puzzles and described in the lingo of standard solutions:

Is it a vision? Does the eye make out

A flight of ernes, rising from aits or aeries,

Whose shadows track across a harsh terrain

Of esker and arete? At waterside,

Does the shocked eeler lay his congers by,

Sighting a Reo driven by an edile?

"A Finished Man" depicts an old schoolboy returning in triumph to his alma mater as an honored alumnus, remembering long-gone grievances and basking:

Seated, he feels the warm sun sculpt his cheek

As the young president gets up to speak.

If the dead die, if he can but forget,

If money talks, he may be perfect yet.

The U.S. office of poet laureate carries no expectation that its occupant will produce verse commemorating important events. In a way, this freedom is ironic, since Wilbur is a master of the occasional poem. Reminiscing in his office in the Library of Congress, he observes, "I suppose, more than most poets of my generation, I've written public poems and direct communications." These include "Speech for the Repeal of the McCarran Act" (1956), an oblique critique of U.S. immigration law, and "For the Student Strikers" (1970), a cadenced plea for moderation during a time of trouble at Wesleyan University. Still, Wilbur likes to be provoked into poetry on his own. "I received a letter from a professor recently saying, 'Oh, come on, why don't you write us a good patriotic poem?' But I don't write poems on order."

As he looks back, Wilbur acknowledges that he often worked at odds with evolving fashions. He did not pick up the rhythm of the Beats or the lacerating self-display of such confessional poets as Sylvia Plath. "It just comes naturally to me to work in meters, rhyme, stanza forms. There were times when it seemed dreadfully stuffy, in some sense reactionary, to write in that manner. I have no case against any other way of writing. I did what I could do."

The laureate finds contemporary American poetry "in a state of good health." He thinks the "days of high-class popular poetry, the age of Longfellow, will not return. But poetry reading has become an admired and generally enjoyed form of concert." And an age of mass communications still makes room for poets. "A friend called me the other day to tell me that my name had cropped up on the TV quiz show Jeopardy. I was impressed, not because I had been mentioned but because the contestant recognized who I was. Imagine < a poet being a household word, along the lines of Spiro Agnew."