SOURCE: Brooker, Jewel Spears. “Mind and World in Richard Wilbur's War Poetry.” War, Literature and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanties 10, no. 1 (spring/summer 1998): 49-70.

In the following essay, the author considers several early poems that Wilbur claims were written “in answer to the inner and outer disorders of the Second World War.”

From 1942 to 1945, Richard Wilbur served with the United States Army in Africa, Italy (Cassino and Anzio), and southern France. On a number of occasions, he has said that this war experience was formative in his work as a poet. He began writing poetry in foxholes for “earnest therapeutic reasons”—to relieve boredom, to cope with anxiety, to “forget how frightened and disoriented” he was (Conversations 37, 196). “My first poems were written in answer to the inner and outer disorders of the Second World War and they helped me, as poems should, to take ahold...