SOURCE: "Master of Metaphor," in The New Republic, Vol. 3, No. 826, May 16, 1988, pp. 23-32.

Hecht is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet whose works include A Summoning of Stones (1954) and The Hard Hours (1968). In the following review, he offers an overview of major themes and techniques in Wilbur's work and praises his New and Collected Poems.

"The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis," observed Wittgenstein. And since today there are critics who maintain that art and criticism are indistinguishable from one another, it ought to follow that the critical work itself is seen from the same August perspective. Yet our experience of the history of criticism and the morphology of aesthetic theory fails conspicuously to support this view. Nothing is more familiar to us than the changes in the mode of taste that time itself seems to bring round in its course. Bach endured an eclipse...