[In] Things of This World Richard Wilbur seems beset by a sort of ennui, the result of a conceptual dependence which bedevils him with an especially treasonous subtlety. Though he is still one of our better poets, the things his poetry says and lives by are so much of the essence of the modern Anglo-American heritage that others have already preëmpted the original and audacious modes of expression he might otherwise use. Compare his "An Event" with Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," for instance. The younger poet has been almost forced into a blander, more discursive tack, for which even his highly developed grace and skill of rhetoric cannot fully compensate. Rhetoric, incidentally, is put to sharper use in the one political piece here: "Speech for the Repeal of the McCarran Act." Genuine poetic energy and concreteness quicken the effect of this piece, which augurs the revival of a genre recently much neglected. But this poet's main chance does not lie in a political direction.
Wilbur's own medicine for his disease is, for him, a good one: translation, and a turn of emphasis toward French sources that goes with it. His dominating vision has always been the aesthetic-secular one of the post-Romantic tradition:
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