SOURCE: Reedy S. J., Gerard. “The senses of Richard Wilbur.” Renascence: A Critical Journal of Letters 21, no. 3 (spring 1969): 145-50.

In the following essay, the writer considers Wilbur as a Romantic poet whose work celebrates the possibility of redemption through the sensual experiences of the world around us

“Poetry does nothing,” Auden once wrote, but one does not have to search far in Auden's own work to find it taking controversial positions, subtly eliminating foes, and waging war against the tawdrier canons of contemporary taste. It is truer to say, as Auden himself might agree, that the poems of any man, taken as a whole, do say something about action-in-the-world. Eliot, for instance, warns us of the isolation of modern man and his need for an Incarnation, Yeats of the need to search ever deeper for adequate symbols of our condition. In their very selection of metaphor, or especially...