Waiting the sun's siege out to collect its wills.

What has happened, I think, is more a continual process of perfecting a chosen, magical language than a process of abandoning the past.

Last week Wilbur recounted what he had been told as a grad student at Harvard, wherein we are told: "Show, don't tell." Then he read a long narrative poem in blank verse which first appeared in the New Yorker last year, and which I remember was about someone telling an insomniac how to get to sleep. What I had not remembered was that the poem explained much more, was a defining of perception and a sad discussion of his art. "What you must manage is to bring to life/ A landscape not worth looking at." "Nor must you dream of opening any door/ Until you've seen what lies beyond it."

It is this peculiar awareness of events beyond himself, of history, of classicism, of others' predicaments, that lends to Wilbur's verse an importance often absent in the work of younger poets. American poetry seems to have always been dominated by something during this century: by Eliot, or W. C. Williams, or now by confessionalism. What is so remarkable about Wilbur is the way in which he belongs to other ages than his own, without ignoring the crises of the present. In a rare political poem he read at Harvard, Wilbur spoke of President Johnson's less than gracious response to a portrait he commissioned; "Wait, sir, and see how time will render you,/ Who talk of vision but have no sight." "The Marginal Way," a poem about the dying capacity for celebration, confessed "the time's fright within me," alluding to Auschwitz, and knew some newspaper on a porch would "flap the tidings of some dirty war."

Others have written with an equal bitterness about the War, about estrangement, about the uncomfortable timidity of poets in America (I'm thinking of the anthology of Poets on Vietnam, Hayden Carruth's "On a Certain Engagement South of Seoul," or Berryman's "Formal Elegy" on the death of President Kennedy). Yet Wilbur has referred to these events in passing, as if to recognize their presence without allowing them to oppress his spirit, knowing the limits of indignations.

Finally, so little is impressive about modernity; amidst a sort of garish decline, the loss of value in life itself, and a corresponding neglect of language, poets like Charles Simic are thinking about what it would be like to take what people think Rousseau means seriously, to

Live alone killing wolves with our bare hands,

Until the last word and the last sound

Of this language I am speaking is forgotten.

But then one thinks of Wilbur, translating with near-perfection the plays of Moliere in their original rhyme and metre (Tartuffe and The Misanthrope), imitating Villon and odd old Provencal poets in a transcription of literary history, cajoling the past into colloquial forms. If anything, it is remembering forgotten languages, not forgetting the few that we so awkwardly remember.

Even his more modern lyrics are unashamed of their formality, their yearning to comprehend the universe as well as the individual and his own meagre world. In the reticent themes of Advice to a Prophet (1961) Wilbur's voice becomes laconic and impersonal. "A Summer Morning," about the pathos of a gardener and a cook experiencing the estate of their decadent employers, "possessing what the owners can but own," could have been a pathetic monologue by Randall Jarrell; most of his poems, aside from the many French translations, have no predecessor at all.

Didacticism and devotion appear strange to us now, like relatives who died a long time ago. It's not that nothing good is being written, but only that American poetry has become more diffuse and less identifiable. The fascination of its origins and of its other possibilities. Wilbur is really about the only poet writing now who refuses to relinquish language entirely to the age, but insists on keeping it "Preserved as by no hero's pains."