Richard Wilbur does what he does well and gladly, learns new ways and enjoys them too. The charges against him are mostly compliments. Yes, he has mastered the iambic line and some other meters; yes, he wears his grace with ease; yes, his poems respond to his control. But these virtues do not set him necessary limits. The counter-evidence is too much present in his work for anyone truly to claim, "Here in a well-lit salon you must of need stay, the crystal polished, the corners cleared." The counterevidence is the pure loveliness becoming, sometimes against his protestations, in its very purity transcendent; lies in the many fine and memorable phrasings; and must include, among poems published in books prior to 1976, "Two Voices in a Meadow" and the longer poem Walking to Sleep. (p. 294)
[I speak] as an early and continuing admirer, and speak in approval. And yet? And yet. The counterevidence does need to be carefully selected. Wilbur has seldom published a bad poem, and seldom a poem from which one does not derive some genuine pleasure; yet the really first-rate poems, the poems that illumine the secret places and to which one returns with a deeper gratitude, are fewer than I would wish. Theodore Roethke, as quoted on the dustjacket of The Mind-Reader, found in Wilbur not a "graceful mind" but a "mind of grace." Well, both; almost always the former; sometimes, blessedly, the latter.
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