For more than four decades Wilbur's poetry has remained much as it has always been--skilled, sophisticated, witty, and impersonal. In 1949 when Philip Rahv in Image and Idea divided American writers into two camps--"Palefaces," elegant and controlled, and "Redskins," intense and spontaneous--Richard Wilbur was clearly a "Paleface." After Lowell made his break in 1959 with modernist impersonality in poetry, he revised Rahv's distinction in his National Book Award comments by specifying American poets as either "cooked" or "raw." Wilbur's "marvelously expert" poetry was undeniably one of the choice examples of "cooked" poetry. In Waiting for the End (1964), at a time when poetic styles were moving away from impersonality, Leslie A. Fiedler, one of the advocates of the reemergence of the "I" at the center of the poem and of a neo-Whitmanesque rejection of objectivity, found the influence of T.S. Eliot's formalistic theories especially strong on Wilbur: "There is no personal source anywhere, as there is no passion and no insanity; the insistent 'I,' the asserting of sex, and the flaunting of madness considered apparently in equally bad taste."
Wilbur has seldom likened his poetry to that of his contemporaries. Instead, in "On My Own Work," an essay collected in Responses, Prose Pieces: 1953-1976 (1976), he described his art as "a public quarrel with the aesthetics of E.A.
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