SOURCE: Michelson, Bruce. “Richard Wilbur's The Mind Reader.” The Southern Review (summer 1979): 763-68.

In the following essay, Michelson explicates the poetic themes of Wilbur's collection, The Mind Reader, focusing on how the collection will endure because the individual poems lend themselves so much to new readings.

When in came out in 1976, The Mind-Reader didn't change any minds. As Richard Wilbur's latest collection of poems, the book was reviewed about eighteen times in predictable ways: people who had understood and liked his work before had more nice things to say (William Pritchard, for example, in the Hudson Review), and people who were stuck on the old idea that Wilbur is a safe soul, somebody to be arch about, did their usual dance. Wilbur has spent thirty years sharpening our sense of irony and showing us that wit and passionate intensity can have everything to do with each other. That...