SOURCE: Michelson, Bruce. “Words.” In Wilbur’s Poetry: Music in a Scattering Time, pp. 36-60. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Michelson explores word-play in several of Wilbur's poems, including “The Regatta” and “Year's End”.

While we acknowledge his erudition and urbanity, we regretfully liken his mildness to the amiable normality of the bourgeois citizen. Emergencies are absent in his poems; he is unseduced by the romantic equation of knowledge and power; he seldom rails at the world. Suspicious of grandiose gestures, of parading the ego, he mediates experience through reason.¹

He is a bell too conscious of its clapper, clapper-happy. Pert but proper, always safe rather than sorry, his poetry is completely without risks, a prize pupil's performance. His ideas are always cut exactly to the size of his poems; he is never puzzled. And the ideas are all sentiments, aware of their...