SOURCE: Cummins, Paul F. “New Wine in Old Bottles.” In Richard Wilbur: A Critical Essay, pp. 10-19. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1971.

In the following excerpt, Cummins suggests that Wilbur's consistent use of traditional verse forms for his poetry owes to the poet's assertion that “the artist cannot hope to translate his direct apprehension of reality into a meaningful expression without the distance afforded by form.”

At a poetry conference in 1953 on “Experimental and Formal Verse,” William Carlos Williams objected to carrying the forms and meters of one age over into the next:

We accept structure as something static, given to us by the hand of God or at least by George Saintsbury, late of the English University. We think and we are taught that English prosody is a fixed dispensation from above. … We are taught to take our prosody without invention and on loan from another...