Metaphysical Poetry: Richard Wilbur - Essay Example

? Metaphysical Poetry: Richard Wilbur Introduction Beginning with his first book, The Beautiful Changes, published in 1947, Richard Wilbur attracted the attention and praise of poets and New Critics such as T.S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks who deemed Wilbur representative of mid-century poetics and declared him one of the most promising voices of the young post second-world-war poets. The formal, witty and impersonal poems deliberately marked by a highly stylized rhetoric-elaborate wordplay (especially puns and paradox), extended conceits, and intricate argument-­seemed to signify the full fruition of the New Critical style. However, the popularity of Wilbur's poetry, has generally suffered-although his technical skill, unparalleled in twentieth century verse, continues to receive critical praise. In 1936, just ten years prior to Wilbur's publication of The Beautiful Changes, New Critical proponent John Crowe Ransom, defined the modem period as the age which "recovered the admirable John Donne; that is the way to identify its literary taste" (The World's Body 78). It should not surprise anyone, then, that ten years later those New Critics who praised Wilbur's poetry also deemed it "metaphysical," frequently comparing it to the poetry of John Donne. Indeed, it is Richard Wilbur, perhaps more than any other twentieth century American poet, whom critics tag as "metaphysical." This paper analyses in what sense is Wilbur's poetry metaphysical? Body Equal engagement with the material and spiritual is the overarching theme in Wilbur's poetry and we find it in nearly all his poems. In his essay, "On My Own Work," he assesses that "All my poems have to do (a critic might say) with the proper relation between the tangible world and the intuitions of the spirit. They assume that such intuitions are, or may be, true: they incline, however, to favor a spirituality that is not abstracted, not dissociated, and not world-renouncing" (160). This search for correspondence is, of course, not unique to metaphysical poetry. The Romantic poets also explored the interplay between reality and imagination and between the material and the spiritual. What marks Wilbur as a metaphysical poet, however, is that he forges a poetic where the mundane and the miraculous easily cohabit and he achieves this balance through a rhetorical method, in which each word is tangible and immediately felt; a method which Eliot found in John Donne's poems and described an apprehension of thought felt at the fingertips (Eliot ‘Selected Essays’ 246). Wilbur employs the same seventeenth century metaphysical poets' rhetorical bag of tricks to assume, maintain, and shift an argumentative stance within a single poem. His rhetoric exploits the power of extended analogies, juxtapositions of extremes, a plain and colloquial style of speech and dramatic argumentation that includes argumentation through formal structure, association and punning word play to procure an emotional and intellectual response to experience. His poem "A Glance from the Bridge" renders the familiar sight ofa city's grime in winter into a new image infused with light and possibility (Wilbur ‘Collected Poems’ 384). The poem accomplishes this through its logical structure of mirror (yet contrasting) six lined stanzas that build off the single image of a person peering off a bridge. In the first stanza the city's river is a "black facade" (line 2) restricted as if "squeezed […] in a vice" (line 4), and gulls are immobile on the frozen and "sullied ice" (line 6). In the second stanza, the imagery turns to that of movement and light as the gulls "rise and braid their gliding, white and spare" (line 7). The river is no longer frozen, but "swirls" (line 10). These contrasts come to a head in the poem's final lines and its shocking resolution: [ ] the freshening river swirled As if an ancient whore undid her gown And showed a body almost like a girl's, (lines 10-12) The juxtaposition of extremes and vivid conceit is meant to shock the reader. It asks several questions at once: How can a whore have a body like a young girl's? How is the city's river like such a whore? And how does the careless glance of one onlooker render this miraculous transformation? Wilbur's rhetorical method in "A Glance from the Bridge," as in his poetry in general, is overall characterized by its metaphysical wit. It is often the exploitation of a latent resemblance between incompatible ideas or images, which capitalizes on the contrast (catachresis) or a reconciliation of contraries, which capitalizes on the union (paradox). Both can produce emotional surprise and express mixed feelings (Williamson 25). In seventeenth century metaphysical poetry we find the exploitation of incompatible images most noticeably in the form of a conceit, such as when Donne compares a happily married couple to a compass, or when Andrew Marvell compares lovers to birds of prey in "To His Coy Mistress." Wilbur's rhetorical wit and celebration of the material led many critics to associate Wilbur's poetry with seventeenth century metaphysical poetry. One of the first critics to align Wilbur with the metaphysical poets was Ralph J. Mills. In "The Lyricism of Richard Wilbur" (1962), Mills declares that Wilbur's "natural predecessors can be located most easily among the Elizabethans, metaphysical, and cavalier poets" (79). He also points specifically to Robert Herrick, "whom he resembles somewhat in the ease and perfection with which he writes, employs forms, captures the right tone and phrase […]" (81). While Mills does not provide a specific example of this affinity, his observation proves correct. Wilbur's early poem, "Poplar, Sycamore" (Wilbur, ‘Collected Poems’, 452) illustrates the same highly polished style that concentrates thematic concerns through meticulous placements and displacements of syntax and line breaks as does, say, Herrick's "To Blossoms." The poem's elegiac tone sees nature as emblematic of human frailty and inevitable death, and the poem's form enacts both in its monosyllabic concluding lines of each stanza. For Herrick, this high-polish style resulted in his poetry, for the most part, to be undervalued and even dismissed during his lifetime (Mills 81). Critics who attempt to assuage the claims that Wilbur's forms are "escapism" argue that Wilbur employs these forms to stave off and thereby control the very chaos that critics accuse him of either avoiding or being merely oblivious to. Wendy Salinger proposes that "Wilbur's generation came out of World War II and its preoccupation with craftsmanship seemed as one of protection. A way to contain the chaos" (2). Wilbur's own acknowledgement of this "conservative impulse" supports Salinger's suggestion. Wilbur admits, "My first poems were written in answer to the inner and outer disorders of the second world war and they helped me, as poems should, to take a hold of raw events and convert them, provisionally, into experience" (Wilbur ‘Responses’ 118). Wilbur's use of traditional forms, meter and rhyme then to control his emotions. Wilbur's speakers often discover that restraint in poetry achieves only a temporary stay. In Wilbur's poems, however, it is not so much the emotion, which he seeks to restrain, but rather, the moment of the experience, be it emotional or rational, which he desires to contain. Moreover, Wilbur's formality is not employed in self-protective escape. He repeatedly insists that "no poetry can have the strength unless it continually bashes itself against the reality of things" (Wilbur ‘Responses’ 217). Wilbur is precise when he calls his poetry a "conversion" of "raw events" Conversion is both a change and an exchange of thoughts and feeling and one that is frequently a spoken interchange; it requires mutual giving and receiving. Unable to convert raw events into an understandable and articulative experience is to live without meaning. Wilbur engages form in conjunction with metaphysical rhetoric as the catalyst to convert raw events into experience. Wilbur is committed to the power of rhetoric and form. "An Event" directly addresses this power (Wilbur ‘Collected Poems’ 347). It begins by flaunting its make-believe rhetoric with its speculative opening: As if a cast of grain leapt back to the hand, A landscapeful of small black birds, intent On the far south, convene at some command At once in the middle of the air, at once are gone With headlong and unanimous consent From the pale trees and fields they settled on. (lines 1-6) In this first stanza, the speculative tone invites the reader's engagement as it imagines that gravity has ceased and time and action move backwards. The birds immediately, and en masse, freely accept the speaker's imaginative hypothesis and fly in answer to "some command." In stanza two, a more direct inquiry focuses on the individual and the reason. What is an individual thing? They roll Like a drunken fingerprint across the sky! (lines 7-8) Wilbur's simile is both viscerally and phonetically exciting. Its vividness captures their mobility. It fixes the birds in language even as they fly from such stability. He seems to take pleasure in his figure as it contemplates equally the birds and his own speech. The exclamation point indicates that he takes even a kind of linguistic joy in his simile, however temporary this fix. Conscious of the need to create tropes to understand experience, he admits his role as trope-maker: Or so I give their image to my soul Until, as if refusing to be caught In any singular vision of my eye Or in the nets and cages of my thought, (lines 9-12) Thought is singular, and aims to trap simultaneously the birds and the viable figures of speech in its nest so that he might cage the singular image that will render understanding. But objects and events rebel: "They tower up, shatter, and madden space / With their divergences" (lines 13-14). They are Swallowed from sight, and leave me in this place Shaping these images to make them stay: Meanwhile, in some formation of their own They fly me still, and steal my thoughts away. (lines 15-18) The delightful punning of "Swallowed from sight" reveals the speaker's good-natured acceptance that he cannot capture perfectly this event. The swallows get the better of him, determining their own movement, which is more perfect in its blending of noun and verb in one great flourish. But he does forge a place for them to be within the cage of his poem. That this net of language is temporary is finally okay with Wilbur. For, It is by words and the defeat of words, Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt, That for a flying moment one may see By what cross-purposes the world is dreamt. (lines 21-24) Language, the poem argues, renders the world coherent. In "Poetry and the Landscape" Wilbur likewise explains: People feel a real unease and separation when confronted by the nameless, and it is perfectly understandable that the first man, set down in the center of the first landscape, applied himself at once to redeeming it from anonymity. What has been spoken into being he spoke again, recreating the creation, giving each a creature a relation to himself, and gaining a kind of symbolic control over what lay around him. (121) Naming, for Wilbur, is a metaphysical act. Chris Eliasmith explains that metaphysics "is the attempt to say, (of those entities believed to exist), what they are…one's metaphysics in an explanatory theory about the nature of those entities" (1). Metaphysical poetry does not create the reality of the world-in fact, it does not question its existence-- but it does bring it into the field of thought and rational understanding. It is thought, articulated in language, that brings the individual into full existence with reality. Wilbur's "The Writer" published in 1976 in his collection The Mind Reader. "The Writer," both a love poem to his daughter and ars poetica, encapsulates Wilbur's desire to name experience (emotional and rational) through a metaphysical method (Wilbur ‘Collected Poems’ 128). "The Writer's" highly structured narrative contains a distinct beginning, middle and end. The beginning sets up the place and action of the poem proper, the middle produces the climax and the end concludes with a resolution to the poem's argument. In the first pan of the poem, the speaker hears his daughter typing in her upstairs bedroom which he figures as "the prow of the house / Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden" (lines 1-2). Surely a pun on linden, (flowers / poesy) we are meant to believe that he, a father and writer, understands this bumpy act of her creative efforts. His prosaic defining of her actions, "My daughter is writing a story," flatly underscores this "understanding" (line 3). He continues to figure his daughter's activity with nautical imagery as he listens to the "commotion of typewriter-keys / Like a chain hauled over a gunwale" (lines 5-6). The imagery leads effortlessly to the speaker's imagining that his daughter's "life is a great cargo" (line 8) in which he "wish[es] her lucky passage" (line 9). The daughter's typing ceases, and the speaker imagines that she "pauses, / As if to reject my thought and its easy figure" (lines 10-11). There is indeed something too easy in the speaker's analogy. The metaphor, which compares the "commotion" of keys to a chain pulled along a ship's side, fails to capture fully the emotional fervor of his daughter's creativity. It notes only the sound of the keys. Her life figured as heavy "cargo" aboard a ship positions her as more a passenger than as captain or even the moving vessel itself. Likewise, his analogy falls short, defining only her outward movements, but speaking nothing about her inner state of mind. The rejection of the too easy analogy marks the turn in the poem and a turn in the speaker's perspective. He rejects his first figure and engages in a search for a more precise analogy. The fits and starts of his daughter's typing soon recall the memory of two years earlier when a starling became trapped in the same room where his daughter is now writing. He remembers, [… ] how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door. We watched the sleek, wild, dark And iridescent creature Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove To the hard floor, or the desk-top. And wait then, humped and bloody, For the wits to try it again; […] (lines 20-28) The image of the trapped starling proves a more intense and precise analogy. It provides what Eliot terms an objective correlative: it immediately calls up the fervent emotions of both the starling and the young typist. The bird, literally, and the girl figuraly, are "humped and bloody." The Speaker then recalls. [ ] how our spirits Rose when, suddenly sure, It lifted off from a chair-back. Beating a smooth course for the right window And clearing the sill of the world. (lines 29-32) The bird perched at "the sill of the world" in the moment of transcendence brings us to the largest implications of Wilbur's metaphysical pathos. Peter Harris explains. "The finding of the right analogy for his daughter's situation is both the measure of the quality of his love and of the quality of his poem […] either we are exacting in our search for what is right and. thereby, affirm life or we are seduced by fatal ease and become, symbolically, unquickened" (424-425). The poem does not end with the bird's flight or the daughter's literary rite of passage. Instead, Wilbur adds a final stanza: It is always a matter, my darling. Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish What I wished you before, but harder. (lines 33-35) The conclusion is more decisive and fitting because the speaker has avoided easy sentiment. The love expressed feels sincere precisely because the father/poet has weighed his verbal options. He does not conclude his love poem until he has rightly understood and named his daughter's experience. This naming of experience, both his daughter's and his own, turns out to be nothing less than a matter "Of life or death." Conclusion As in "The Writer," Wilbur's poetry overall denotes an urgency to handle emotional responses and the concurrent need to name experience, despite the limitations of attempting to describe the felt moment. By engaging the seventeenth century metaphysical poets' rhetoric, modes of argument and debate, wit and search for correspondence, Wilbur forges a poetic that succeeds in naming experience. His poetry, in the end, counters those critics who charge that his formal and witty poetry is too "impersonal" and removed from the everyday realities of mid-century American life. Studied articulation rather than spontaneous confession, and metaphoric engagement rather than mimetic representation, names difficult experience. Wilbur's poetry also breaks with early modem poetics of T. S. Eliot. John Crowe Ransom and others. His formal poetry frames experience and discovers new unities of experience that emphasize harmony rather than chaos, and engagement rather than evasiveness. Perhaps most importantly, his poetry refreshes reality through a metaphysical method that restores the wonder of ordinary things. As he writes in the title poem of his first collection of poems, The Beautiful Changes: [ ] the beautiful changes In such kind ways. Wishing ever to sunder Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose For a moment all that it touches back to wonder. (lines 14-18). Work Cited Eliasmith, Chris. Dictionary of Philosophy of the Mind. 20, October 2011. http://philosophy.uwaterloo.ca/MindDict/ontology.html Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays. New Edition. NY: Harcourt. Brace & World. 1964. Harris, Peter. "Forty Years of Richard Wilbur: The Loving Work of an Equilibrist.' Virginia Quarterly Review 66.3. (Summer 1990) 413 (14).04. Mills, Ralph J. "The Lyricism of Richard Wilbur." Modem Age 6 (Fall 1962): 436-40. Ransom, John Crowe. The World's Body, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1938. Richard Wilbur. “Poetry and the Landscape.” Gyorgy Kepes, ed. The New Landscape in Art and Science. Chicago: Paul Theobald and Co., 1956. Salinger, Wendy, Ed and intro. Richard Wilbur's Creation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983. Wilbur, Richard, “On My Own Work.” Responses: Prose Pieces. 1953-1976. Expanded Edition. Story Line Press, 2000. Wilbur, Richard, Collected Poems 1943-2004, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004. Wilbur, Richard. "On Lying." Responses: Prose Pieces. 1953-1976. Expanded Edition. Story Line Press, 2000. Williamson, George. The Donne Tradition: A Study of English Poetry from Donne to Cowley. NY: Noonday Press, 1958. Read More