SOURCE: "Poetry's Debt to Poetry," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XXVI, No. 2, Summer, 1973, pp. 273-94.

Wilbur is an American poet and critic. Respected for the craftsmanship and elegance of his verse, he employs formal poetic structures and smoothly flowing language as a response to disorder and chaos in modern life. In the following excerpt, Wilbur comments on Roethke's emulation of other poets.

It is fatal for a writer to have one hero only; submitting to a single model, admiring but one syntax and lexicon, means that you will say what you don't mean, and that you will never find the right words for what you do mean. A commanding imagination, as many have said before me, steals not from one writer but selectively from all writers, taking whatever will help in the articulation of its own sense of things.

In this connection, the most precarious of the fine...