SOURCE: "Wilbur's 'The Writer'," in The Explicator, Vol. 50, No. 1, Fall 1991, pp. 58-60.

In the following essay, Ramanen explains Wilbur's use of form and contrasting imagery to create a unified poem.

Richard Wilbur's "The Writer" (New and Collected Poems, 1988), a poem about his daughter writing a story, is an outstanding example of the poet's method of setting up a poetic debate within the terms of a single meditative voice. The debate becomes an occasion for the demonstration of the deft formal control the poet has over stanza and line, point of view, diction, and imagery, which are all forged into a unity clinched by strong poetic closure.

Wilbur sustains through the poems what Brad Leithauser, speaking of formal verse, calls the "prosodic contract" that a poet enters into with the reader. The nature of the contract is clear from the pattern of three-line stanzas that the poem compares. The...