This section contains 3,052 words (approx. 11 pages at 300 words per page) |
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...
This section contains 3,052 words (approx. 11 pages at 300 words per page) |