SOURCE: Weatherhead, A. K. “Richard Wilbur: The Poetry of Things.” ELH 35, no. 4 (December 1968): 606-17.

In the following essay, the author explores the significance of the material object in Wilbur's poetry and juxtaposes Wilbur's work with poets such as William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore.

I think it a great vice to convey everything by imagery, particularly if the imagery is not interrelated. There ought to be areas of statement. … The statement should have obliquity, and congruence to the imagery, as Marianne Moore's does—not vitiating the objects, but rather finding in them another and ideal dimension.

—Richard Wilbur: “The Genie in the Bottle.”

The question that has most engaged poetry in this century concerns the image. To what extent, to what end, and with what success may the image stand alone, unorganized, unencumbered, or unassisted by connective rhetoric? In the beginning there was T. E. Hulme, and Imagism...