Warren, Roethke, and Wilbur: Exterior Essay

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Like Roethke and Warren, Richard Wilbur blends classicism and philosophy with humble images: "Throughout his career Wilbur has shown, within the compass of his classicism, enviable variety. His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection" ("Richard Wilbur," Poets.org, 2010). Like Roethke, Wilbur's use of nature tends to be personal, even though Wilbur's diction is more formal and archaic in tone than "My Papa's Waltz." For example, in "The Writer," Wilbur writes of his young daughter, writing a story in her room, and compares her effort to chasing a frightened starling out of her room: "It is always a matter, my darling, / of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish / What I wished you before, but harder."

As with Warren, in Wilbur's poetry about the natural world mirrors the poet's interior state.

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But rather than deliberately attempting to create elaborate metaphors about nature, Wilbur makes comparisons between nature and his loved ones -- lovers, daughters, and wife -- and allows the reader to attach greater metaphorical significance to the image. Wilbur shows, never tells the reader what to think. This can be seen in the deceptively simple love lyric "June Light," when Wilbur writes: "Then your love looked as simple and entire / as that picked pear you tossed me, and your face / as legible as pearskin's fleck and trace." Wilbur connects the vision of his beloved to the sensuality of a June spring in the form of a pear, yet the notion of reading the pearskin like reading a human face indicates the complexity of both the human and natural world. Wilbur appreciates both simultaneously, and never uses nature merely to serve humanity as a metaphor.

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