Richard Wilbur, in [Walking to Sleep] shows again the ability of the shape-changer, the capacity to move from form to form, or even from voice to voice, depending on the particular requirements made of him by the development of a given poem. In a period when the identity of the poet is often associated with the singularity of his voice (Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens), Wilbur's ability to mute the insistence of personality may make the level of his accomplishment less immediately evident, because the accomplishment is expressed in so many different ways. Wilbur is both a translator and a theatre-poet: situations in which one must speak another's words, or hear another voice speaking one's own.

The title of Wilbur's second book was Ceremony, and that word still expresses, I think, much of his most central approach to the poem. To Wilbur … it seems to me that form is...