Richard Wilbur, in [Walking to Sleep] shows again the ability of the shape-changer, the capacity to move from form to form, or even from voice to voice, depending on the particular requirements made of him by the development of a given poem. In a period when the identity of the poet is often associated with the singularity of his voice (Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens), Wilbur's ability to mute the insistence of personality may make the level of his accomplishment less immediately evident, because the accomplishment is expressed in so many different ways. Wilbur is both a translator and a theatre-poet: situations in which one must speak another's words, or hear another voice speaking one's own.
The title of Wilbur's second book was Ceremony, and that word still expresses, I think, much of his most central approach to the poem. To Wilbur … it seems to me that form is a means of understanding, the shape of the poem one of the most serious comments on the meaning of the poem. And it seems also that form functions as a kind of charm: ceremony is the way in which the tissue of events is not only understood, but made moral and substantial. The long title poem of this book, "Walking to Sleep," is an exercise in how to control and formalize language to a given purpose…. The poem is a magic by which to go to sleep; it is also a comment on the way such magics work: they permit us to achieve an agreement with the world of which we are a part. That agreement is not a submission, or even necessarily a reconciliation, but it is an awareness of an order…. (pp. 363-64)
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