Richard Wilbur gave a reading from his poems here a week and a half ago. There were about 150 people in Burr B when he arrived from dinner at the Signet. It may have been the incongruity of the room, the Delphic tiers of the lecture hall dwarfing the rough-hewn podium, or the poetry itself; somehow the evening was majestic and depressing, and reflective of what poetry has recently become: accomplished, public, ill-at-ease.

Respectful of his heritage, Wilbur stood patiently last week before a lot of people who like Norman Mailer and Sylvia Plath (which is alright!) and read like a poet exhausted by the age. At dinner, he'd said something about growing "older and more vulgar," but in Burr he seemed young, and strangely erudite. Introducing one of his poems, "A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa," he dismissed the question of "transcendance and acceptance" as "sounding too much like a critic," but at other moments talked offhandedly of Pascal ("The spirit doesn't have any business denying things in the realm of fact"), St. Augustine ("The soul is complete in every part of the body"), and Pasternak. It was almost as if the rude irreverence which characterizes books like Paul Carroll's anthology of The New American Poets, the things James Dickey says about "the distant and learnedly distasteful tone of Eliot or the music scholarliness of Pound" were being warded off for a while longer, if only to recall The Beautiful Changes (1947, Wilbur's first book).

Donald Hall pointed out in his preface to a collection of Contemporary American Poetry that "the typical ghastly poem of the fifties was a Wilbur poem not written by Wilbur, a poem with tired wit and obvious comparisons and nothing to keep the mind or the ear occupied." The Wilbur poem itself was exemplified by one of his finest books from that era, Things of This World (1956) which dared to include sonnets, to talk about the soul, to cope with a language unselfconscious in its striving to acknowledge the Metaphysical poets or Romanticism.

If Wilbur's style has changed surprisingly little since his first collection, published over twenty years ago, it has been because he found his voice in the beginning. Consciously poetic, nostalgic, and detached, his most recent poems in the New Yorker echo the simplicity and sensitivity of the poems for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957, and the National Book Award for Things of This World. The quiet titles of the New Yorker poems. "In the Field" and "in a Churchyard," recall two other poems from 1947, "In a Bird Sanctuary" and "A Dutch Courtyard."

Where other poets since the War, notably Lowell and John Berryman, have unceasingly sought and exhausted their techniques before arriving at masterpieces like Life Studies and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, Wilbur began and has continued in delight, while (to alter Frost's remark) wisdom has shown no signs of desertion. Here are two stanzas from "In the Field":

This field-grass brushed our legs Last night, when out we stumbled looking up,

Wading as through the cloudy dregs Of a wide, sparkling cup,

Our thrown-back heads aswim In the grand, kept appointments of the air,

Save where a pine at the sky's rim Took something from the bear.

and from "Sun and Air":

The air staggers under the sun, and heat-morasses

Flutter the birds down; wind barely climbs the hills,

Saws thin and splinters among the roots of the grasses;

All stir sickens, and falls into barn shadows, spills

Into hot hay and heat-hammered road dust, makes no sound,