When it came out in 1976, The Mind-Reader didn't change any minds. As Richard Wilbur's latest collection of poems, the book was reviewed about eighteen times in predictable ways: people who had understood and liked his work before had more nice things to say (William Pritchard, for example, in the Hudson Review), and people who were stuck on the old idea that Wilbur is a safe soul, somebody to be arch about, did their usual dance. Wilbur has spent thirty years sharpening our sense of irony and showing us that wit and passionate intensity can have everything to do with each other. That is the kind of cause that divides people for good—and so it is no surprise that some of The Mind-Reader's readers found there the same old Wilbur they expected.
There are, however, some new sides to the Wilbur who shows himself here. One thing that is new is the book's defiant surfaces. The poems are as witty and elegant and deadly serious as ever, but the collection, taken altogether, seems to stand up against every kind of poet-chic, as if Wilbur meant to strut around for a moment, with an angry glint in his eye, wearing the "bourgeois" mask which his detractors hang on him. (p. 763)
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