SOURCE: Yezzi, David. “A Passion Joined to Courtesy and Art.” Poetry 177, no. 4 (February 2001): 337-44.

The following essay reviews the later work of Richard Wilbur, noting that Wilbur has followed Yvor Winters' dictum, “Write little; do it well.”

“Write little; do it well,” Yvor Winters advised. Nearly eighty, Richard Wilbur has long taken this dictum to heart, and what acumen that elusive well suggests in Wilbur: masterly poetic technique, a dynamic poise between thought and feeling resulting in memorable speech. Although Wilbur's production has slowed in recent years, paucity should not be mistaken for poverty; Mayflies contains poems to rank with the best of Wilbur's New and Collected Poems, awarded the Pulitzer Prize (his second) in 1989.

Typically, a poet's powers dwindle with age. Do fewer new poems of the first water appear in this book compared with the last? Possibly, though to point it out sounds churlish, as if...