A Poetry of Happiness

A tribute to Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur was a prolific American poet and a highly regarded translator of French verse and drama (esp. Moliere). He was the United States Poet Laureate (from 1987-88). He won two Pulitzer prizes, the National Book Award (1957, Things of This World), and a host of other awards and honors. In 2017, one journalist commemorating his life and work noted that, “Wilbur may be the most celebrated poet that Americans by and large have never heard of.”¹

Born in New York City in 1921, Wilbur grew up in an artistic and literary context in “a little British colony” in Caldwell, New Jersey. His grandfather (and his great-grandfather) were newspaper editors, and his father was a painter/commercial artist. Wilbur eventually pursued his literary/journalistic interests at Amherst College, and later enlisted in the Army (signal corps) when the US entered WWII. He served in Europe and experienced some pretty awful things (but managed always to keep the horror from piercing his heart too deeply—more on this later). After the war, he attended Harvard’s graduate school and then taught in various capacities for decades at several colleges and universities including Wellesley and Amherst. He produced eleven (or so) poetry collections along with many translations and essays. His first collection was published in 1947; his last in 2010.

He died on October 14, 2017 at the age 96. I only somewhat jokingly like to suggest that in “poet years” that must translate to something like 300 years old. Indeed, many of most successful contemporaries such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell died in the 1970s or earlier. 

He was unique not only in this longevity, but in both the themes and tenor of his work. He was a formalist, meaning that he took a more traditional approach to stanza, meter, rhyme, etc., and while several of his contemporaries also shared in this twentieth-century resuscitation of form (in response to an obsessive and pharisaical devotion to free verse), as a rule the themes of the modern era (e.g. dysfunction, alienation, despair, etc.) continued to be the major focus for many, especially the so-called confessional poets (Plath, Lowell, Berryman, etc.). Wilbur was therefore criticized by his peers for being relatively optimistic and “affirmative.” Ultimately, Wilbur did agree with these sorts of characterizations, but not because he viewed it as a deficiency; indeed, it is precisely those qualities that make his work so wonderful.

This is what I wish to highlight—that amidst so much tortured, maniacal verse, and within our current artistic context of the slavishly informal, the unmusical, the pretentiously ironic, the relativistic, the self-congratulatory, the shamefully violent and the shamelessly sexual—we have a poet that weathers the trends without losing a deep sense of beauty and wonder, of order and thanksgiving. When Christian Wiman (former editor of Poetry Magazine) was asked by a student whether he knew, “any ‘big-time contemporary poets who, I don’t know, liked life?’” Richard Wilbur came first to his mind. This is not to say that Wilbur is a sort of poetic Pollyanna. In speaking of Wilbur’s celebration of “the blind delight of being” (a line from his poem “The Reader”), Wiman also wrote:

Blind delight is not the same as willful blindness. Wilbur saw shocking combat in World War II, which was when he began to write in earnest. As his biographers Robert and Mary Bagg reveal, he experienced serious depression and addiction, and he suffered that private apocalypse known only by the very old, who lose everything they ever loved, slowly.

However, Wiman continues, “We need art to explore the darkest recesses of our lives and minds. But we also need art to tell us why this world is worth loving, and therefore saving.” (I encourage you to read Wiman’s brief tribute in its entirety.)²

It is important to remember that a receptivity to beauty and light, a disposition prone to affirmation and joy does not imply a naiveté nor a shallow mind. These days a skeptical, even pessimistic spirit (to which I myself am susceptible) is a kind of lazy way to win intellectual credibility. However, one needn’t so much as scratch the surface of Wilbur’s poetry to discover in it an incredible depth of literary and philosophical understanding. Still, Wilbur was not without a critical spirit, and in his criticisms he also demonstrates his characteristic wisdom. Consider the following passages from his talk “Poetry and Happiness.” In conveying the ways in which poetry may be pursued as a means to happiness, he notes:

We live in a century during which America has possessed many poets of great ability; nevertheless, it is no secret that the personal histories of our poets, particularly in the last thirty years, are full of alcoholism, aberration, emotional breakdowns, the drying-up of talent, and suicide. There is no need to learn this from gossip or biography; it is plainly enough set down in the poetry of our day. And it seems to me that the key to all this unhappiness may lie in the obligatory eccentricity, nowadays, of each poet’s world, in the fact that our society has no cultural heart from which to write.

He goes on to expand on this lack of “cultural heart”:

One cannot deny that in the full sense of the word culture — the sense that has to do with the humane unity of a whole people — our nation is impoverished. We are not an articulate organism, and what most characterizes our life is a disjunction and incoherence aggravated by an intolerable rate of change. It is easy to prophesy against us. Our center of political power, Washington, is a literary and intellectual vacuum, or nearly so; the church, in our country, is broken into hundreds of sorry and provincial sects; colleges of Christian foundation hold classes as usual on Good Friday; our cities bristle like quartz clusters with faceless new buildings of aluminum and glass, bare of symbolic ornament because they have nothing to say; our painters and sculptors despair of achieving any human significance, and descend into the world of fashion to market their Coke-bottles and optical toys; in the name of the public interest, highways are rammed through old townships and wildlife sanctuaries; all other public expenditure is begrudged, while the bulk of the people withdraw from community into an affluent privacy.

In view of this, our contemporary context, Wilbur adds that “where art does not arise from and nourish a vital sense of community, it is little more than an incitement to schizophrenia.”

Wilbur did not simply lament this cultural malaise; he lived a life largely in defiance of it. One might say that he offered some small means toward its healing. And he did so by invoking—in a uniquely relevant and accessible fashion—the longstanding classical, literary, philosophical, and theological deposit that he inherited. For him, writers and thinkers like esp. Dante and Milton should not be regarded as retrograde to the development of poetic skill and sensibility, but instructive and foundational. He remarked in one interview that “the experience of so many writing classes….distracts a lot of people from John Milton—from finding as they should, continuous life in the past,” and he quoted Yvor Winters in characterizing “a lot of younger poets [as] prisoners of contemporaneity.”³

It is not, however, only Wilbur’s intellectual and artistic vision that stood against the pitfalls and pathologies of a post-modern consumeristic world. His life too was marked by a love of the good. Among his struggles and successes, Richard Wilbur was industrious, gentlemanly, kindhearted, loyal, and devout. He was gracious to those who were envious of him (e.g. John Berryman), and he worked collaboratively and patiently with some rather difficult personalities. Consider too his long and loving marriage. One might say a marriage of 65 years is unusual, not just for the public figure or artistic temperament, but for any demographic. When his wife Charlee died in 2007, Wilbur was deeply heartbroken.

In short, Richard Wilbur is a poet who proves what I’ve always hoped to be true, that one can be a devoted artist without being a hopeless narcissist or a damaged, faithless reprobate. On the contrary, Wilbur leaves us with a perspective and a body of work better equipped to stand the test of time than many of the most successful writers in the past century. I’ll conclude with Wilbur’s own lovely words in one interview with the Paris Review:

I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith, but that’s my attitude. My feeling is that when you discover order and goodness in the world, it is not something you are imposing—it is something which is likely really to be there, whatever crumminess and evil and disorder there may also be. I don’t take disorder or meaninglessness to be the basic character of things.⁴

In the final analysis, I have to agree.

1. “Remembering Richard Wilbur,” Rand Richards Cooper, Commonweal. Oct. 19, 2017.

2. “The Poet of Light,” Christian Wiman, The New York Times. Jan. 12, 2018.

3. Interview with Sunil Iyengar, Contemporary Poetry Review.

4. Interview, The Paris review. 1977.