SOURCE: Nadel, Alan. “Roethke, Wilbur, and the Vision of the Child: Romantic and Augustan in Modern Verse.” The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children's Literature 2, no. 2 (1978): 94-112.

In the following essay, the author provides several close readings of poems such as “Juggler,” “The Beautiful Changes,” and “Boy At the Window,” among others, to suggest that Wilbur takes a neo-classical approach to children's verse and childhood.

One of the oldest tenets of our literary tradition is that poetry ought to delight and instruct. From Horace to Matthew Arnold, implicitly or explicitly, the thread runs: art serves some function—moral, didactic, religious—and employs aesthetically pleasing devices of language and form so that the message is headed and understood. Harry Bailly, for instance, asks of the Canterbury Pilgrims tales with “sentence” and “solaas,” tales that instruct and please.

Rhyme and rhythm, particularly, have stood as exemplary methods...