Wilbur's first book, "The Beautiful Changes" (1947), marked him immediately as something special. A trace of indebtedness to Yeats and a clear line of descent from Marianne Moore were visible as signs that his talent was still emergent, but of the existence of that talent there could be no doubt. The poems, richly worded and strictly formal, nevertheless moved within their strictures with an ease and assurance that marked Wilbur as the possessor of as fine an ear for the smooth-flowing line and the self-rounding stanza rhythm as could be claimed by any man now writing in English. He had, moreover, achieved a metaphoric sense undeniably his own. Consider for example this description of a ballet dancer fresh from the formal perfections of her dance and now slumped into the shapelessness of human fatigue:
So she will turn and walk through metal halls
To where some ancient woman will unmesh
Her small strict shape, and yawns will turn her face
Into a little wilderness of flesh.
And rich as are the immediate physical sensations of such a description, it is the nature of Wilbur's talent that these physical punctualities are precisely that which is thought with…. The passage is not only a description of a particular tired dancer, but of the boundary between life and artifice, a boundary crossed and recrossed in Wilbur's poems, always with the central driving intention of finding that artifice which will most include the most of life. For Wilbur is a poet at mortal play, an artificer. Even the title of his first book ("changes" must be read both as a noun and as a verb) attest how carefully he plans his double meanings.
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