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Things of This World
Richard Wilbur's third collection includes poems which had originally appeared in New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, Hudson Review and other literary magazines as well as in the anthology A Bestiary.
- GenresPoetry
50 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1956
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209 people want to read
About the author
Richard Wilbur
255 books72 followersEarly years :
Wilbur was born in New York City and grew up in North Caldwell, New Jersey.He graduated from Montclair High School in 1938, having worked on the school newspaper as a student there. He graduated from Amherst College in 1942 and then served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1945 during World War II. After the Army and graduate school at Harvard University, Wilbur taught at Wesleyan University for two decades and at Smith College for another decade. At Wesleyan, he was instrumental in founding the award-winning poetry series of the University Press.He received two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry and, as of 2011, teaches at Amherst College.He is also on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.He married Charlotte Hayes Ward in 1942 after his graduation from Amherst; she was a student at nearby Smith College.
Career :
When only 8 years old, Wilbur published his first poem in John Martin's Magazine. His first book, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, appeared in 1947. Since then he has published several volumes of poetry, including New and Collected Poems (Faber, 1989). Wilbur is also a translator, specializing in the 17th century French comedies of Molière and the dramas of Jean Racine. His translation of Tartuffe has become the standard English version of the play, and has been presented on television twice (a 1978 production is available on DVD.)
Continuing the tradition of Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, Wilbur's poetry finds illumination in everyday experiences. Less well-known is Wilbur's foray into lyric writing. He provided lyrics to several songs in Leonard Bernstein's 1956 musical, Candide, including the famous "Glitter and Be Gay" and "Make Our Garden Grow." He has also produced several unpublished works such as "The Wing" and "To Beatrice".
His honors include the 1983 Drama Desk Special Award for his translation of The Misanthrope, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award, both in 1957, the Edna St Vincent Millay award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Chevalier, Ordre National des Palmes Académiques. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959.In 1987 Wilbur became the second poet, after Robert Penn Warren, to be named U.S. Poet Laureate after the position's title was changed from Poetry Consultant. In 1989 he won a second Pulitzer, this one for his New and Collected Poems. On October 14, 1994, he received the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton. In 2006, Wilbur won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 2010 he won the National Translation Award for the translation of The Theatre of Illusion by Pierre Corneille.
Wilbur was born in New York City and grew up in North Caldwell, New Jersey.He graduated from Montclair High School in 1938, having worked on the school newspaper as a student there. He graduated from Amherst College in 1942 and then served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1945 during World War II. After the Army and graduate school at Harvard University, Wilbur taught at Wesleyan University for two decades and at Smith College for another decade. At Wesleyan, he was instrumental in founding the award-winning poetry series of the University Press.He received two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry and, as of 2011, teaches at Amherst College.He is also on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.He married Charlotte Hayes Ward in 1942 after his graduation from Amherst; she was a student at nearby Smith College.
Career :
When only 8 years old, Wilbur published his first poem in John Martin's Magazine. His first book, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, appeared in 1947. Since then he has published several volumes of poetry, including New and Collected Poems (Faber, 1989). Wilbur is also a translator, specializing in the 17th century French comedies of Molière and the dramas of Jean Racine. His translation of Tartuffe has become the standard English version of the play, and has been presented on television twice (a 1978 production is available on DVD.)
Continuing the tradition of Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, Wilbur's poetry finds illumination in everyday experiences. Less well-known is Wilbur's foray into lyric writing. He provided lyrics to several songs in Leonard Bernstein's 1956 musical, Candide, including the famous "Glitter and Be Gay" and "Make Our Garden Grow." He has also produced several unpublished works such as "The Wing" and "To Beatrice".
His honors include the 1983 Drama Desk Special Award for his translation of The Misanthrope, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award, both in 1957, the Edna St Vincent Millay award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Chevalier, Ordre National des Palmes Académiques. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959.In 1987 Wilbur became the second poet, after Robert Penn Warren, to be named U.S. Poet Laureate after the position's title was changed from Poetry Consultant. In 1989 he won a second Pulitzer, this one for his New and Collected Poems. On October 14, 1994, he received the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton. In 2006, Wilbur won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 2010 he won the National Translation Award for the translation of The Theatre of Illusion by Pierre Corneille.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
April 25, 2013
Things of this World
by Richard Wilbur
The spectacular poems of Richard Wilbur’s Things of this World will last long after his pleasant pastoral ballads have faded from memory. Published in 1956, the collection of form and structured free verse centered on the New England countryside made him a superstar, establishing a template for Wilbur and modern nature poetry as we know it. In subsequent decades, he would transform the book’s aesthetic conceits — traditionalism, naturalism, Emersonian sensibility — into a kind of brand; it must be said that Wilbur wrote enough superb poems to give that brand validity. Yet after rereading his work, I find that his finest and most lasting poems are in World, a book uncalcified by his repetitive themes and passions.
Along with Karl Shapiro, Thom Gunn, and James Merrill, Wilbur was at the vanguard of New Formalism, a school of writing adamantly against the excesses of modernism and for a return to traditional forms of literature. The leaders of New Formalism were young, eloquent, brash and invested in clarity at time when so many Modernists had become psychotic or ossified in literary pretentiousness. What separated Wilbur from his peers is that you could see in his poetry what he was for, not just what he was against. A fine example of what he was doing is “John Chrysostom,” his dirge against the Catholic saint famous for propagating the notion that Jews needed to be coerced into Christianity:
He who had gone a beast
Down on his knees and hands
Remembering lust and murder
Felt now a gust of grace
Lifted his burnished face
From the psalter of the sands
And found his thoughts in order
And cleared his throat at last
What they heard was a voice
That spoke what they could learn
Yet rang like a great choir
He having taught hell’s fire
A singing way to burn
And borrowed of some dumb beast
The wilderness to rejoice
–from “John Chrysostom”
If you piece together the hint of sarcasm in Wilbur’s account of Chrysostom’s conversion with the disbelief in his gospel (he having taught hell’s fire/a singing way to burn), then add the context of the saint’s anti-semitism, you have a very effective dig at Ezra Pound’s Cantos: a book whose great theme is that Jews have benefited and stolen from every society that they’ve been in. As a poem, however, Chrysostom does more than just give Pound the finger. Religious, but without the anguished metaphysics of T. S. Eliot, the poem owes a debt to the thoughtful polemics of Gerald Manley Hopkins, whose sublime language mixed beautifully with his Episcopal stoicism. Structurally, it rhymes, but not for the sake of making William Carlos Williams angry; working within a serious of forgotten traditions and doing so in a mature voice.
“Chrysostom” establishes a tone for Things of this World, one of intellectual and moral seriousness at a time when intellectual and moral seriousness weren’t in style. After reading the book, I don’t find it hard to see why it had such an appeal, and why Wilbur was one of the most famous writers in America. Post-war poetry had been stewarded by old modernist icons that had declared America virtually useless, and doing so in ways that were more often than not hysterical. Wilbur, on the other hand, was a bright, responsible young man who told the reader what America did with a learned, common tongue. Few poems accomplished that better than Sonnet, his sketch of a New England farm:
The winter deepening, the hay all in
The barn fat with cattle, the apple crop
Conveyed to market for the fragrant bin
He thinks the time has come to make a stop
And sinks half-grudging in his firelit seat
Though with his heavy body’s full consent
In what would be the posture of defeat
But for that look of rigorous content
Outside, the night dies down like one great cow
Against his cast-off clothing where it stands
Up to his knees in miles of hustled snow,
Flapping and jumping like a kind of fire,
And floating skyward its abandoned hands
In gestures of invincible desire.
–from “Sonnet”
“Sonnet” is essentially Wilbur 101: organic in language, empathetic without being fey, lyrically expansive within the framework of form without sacrificing the form or the framework. As stunning as “Sonnet” and numerous other fixed verses are, I was surprised to find that the best poems of World were free verse, despite Wilbur’s frequently-expressed distaste for the genre. The book’s finest form poems dazzle, but only in declaration; when Wilbur puts the emphasis on landscape instead of his personal voice, the language becomes constricted. Yet look what he does with backdrop in the opening lines of “Marginalia”, his subtle ode to a New England creek:
Things concentrate at the edges: the pond surface
Is borne to fish and man and it is spread
In textile scum and damask light, on which
The lily pads are set; and there is also
Inlaid unruddy twigs, becalmed pine leaves
Air-baubles, and the chain mail of froth
–from “Marginalia”
And in one of his few non-pastorals, the sublime title poem of the book:
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing
–from “Things of this World”
Freed from rhyme, his scenery becomes richer, deeper, full of imagery that is uniquely his own. Even his lyric lines, the cornerstone to all of Wilbur’s great poetry, are finer and more natural, achieving more in a less ambitious format. “Marginalia” and the title poem are Wilbur at his absolute best, showing him not as a symbol against modernism nor as a gatekeeper for the old ways, but as a poet with his own individual voice, as fine as any American poet in the 20th century.
Finishing World, I wanted to indignantly bristle against the criticism that Wilbur had devolved into a traditionalist Yankee dullard in the past 50 years. After finishing his collected poems, however, I felt sorry that I couldn’t. In Wilbur’s later poems, he assumes the mantle of “man of the system,” a standard bearer against the confessional works of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. His poetry suffered, retreating into well-worn form patterns with well-worn themes. Too often he would fall back on easy ideas and lines, like the beginning ones in his ode to a tree:
You might not know this old tree by its bark
Which once was striated, smooth, and glossy dark
So deep now are the rifts which separate
Its roughened surface into flake and plate
–from “Black Birch in Winter”
and his benign paean to strikebreaking:
It is not yet the time for the rock, the bullet, the blunt
Slogan that fuddles the mind toward force
Let the new sound in our streets be the patient sound
Of your discourse.
–from “Response to the Student Strikers”
These lines are fine, full of moderate feeling and sentiment, but the dissipation in quality and craft is more than noticeable. This more recent Wilbur is a good, thoughtful person who, like many good thoughtful people, mistakes his decency for artistic sweat. Both “Birch In Winter” and “Student Strikers” are gentle in temperament, yet affixed in tone and content even for the standards of the nature and polemical poem; lacking every one of the dark aspects about the personal poetry of Lowell, Plath, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton save the riveting, uncontrollable sense of the unexpected that made their best poems work.
But every Wilbur book is worth your time, containing more than a few flashes of brilliance and a commitment to the highest ideals in craft and ethics. For those who believe that American literature, for all its flaws, is worth studying, and that craft in poetry means more than personality, background, or ability to shock, Richard Wilbur’s poetry is a balm. Things of this World is Wilbur at his finest, containing some of the most exquisitely crafted poems I have ever read. If one wants to understand poetry — American poetry in particular — Wilbur is required reading.
by Richard Wilbur
The spectacular poems of Richard Wilbur’s Things of this World will last long after his pleasant pastoral ballads have faded from memory. Published in 1956, the collection of form and structured free verse centered on the New England countryside made him a superstar, establishing a template for Wilbur and modern nature poetry as we know it. In subsequent decades, he would transform the book’s aesthetic conceits — traditionalism, naturalism, Emersonian sensibility — into a kind of brand; it must be said that Wilbur wrote enough superb poems to give that brand validity. Yet after rereading his work, I find that his finest and most lasting poems are in World, a book uncalcified by his repetitive themes and passions.
Along with Karl Shapiro, Thom Gunn, and James Merrill, Wilbur was at the vanguard of New Formalism, a school of writing adamantly against the excesses of modernism and for a return to traditional forms of literature. The leaders of New Formalism were young, eloquent, brash and invested in clarity at time when so many Modernists had become psychotic or ossified in literary pretentiousness. What separated Wilbur from his peers is that you could see in his poetry what he was for, not just what he was against. A fine example of what he was doing is “John Chrysostom,” his dirge against the Catholic saint famous for propagating the notion that Jews needed to be coerced into Christianity:
He who had gone a beast
Down on his knees and hands
Remembering lust and murder
Felt now a gust of grace
Lifted his burnished face
From the psalter of the sands
And found his thoughts in order
And cleared his throat at last
What they heard was a voice
That spoke what they could learn
Yet rang like a great choir
He having taught hell’s fire
A singing way to burn
And borrowed of some dumb beast
The wilderness to rejoice
–from “John Chrysostom”
If you piece together the hint of sarcasm in Wilbur’s account of Chrysostom’s conversion with the disbelief in his gospel (he having taught hell’s fire/a singing way to burn), then add the context of the saint’s anti-semitism, you have a very effective dig at Ezra Pound’s Cantos: a book whose great theme is that Jews have benefited and stolen from every society that they’ve been in. As a poem, however, Chrysostom does more than just give Pound the finger. Religious, but without the anguished metaphysics of T. S. Eliot, the poem owes a debt to the thoughtful polemics of Gerald Manley Hopkins, whose sublime language mixed beautifully with his Episcopal stoicism. Structurally, it rhymes, but not for the sake of making William Carlos Williams angry; working within a serious of forgotten traditions and doing so in a mature voice.
“Chrysostom” establishes a tone for Things of this World, one of intellectual and moral seriousness at a time when intellectual and moral seriousness weren’t in style. After reading the book, I don’t find it hard to see why it had such an appeal, and why Wilbur was one of the most famous writers in America. Post-war poetry had been stewarded by old modernist icons that had declared America virtually useless, and doing so in ways that were more often than not hysterical. Wilbur, on the other hand, was a bright, responsible young man who told the reader what America did with a learned, common tongue. Few poems accomplished that better than Sonnet, his sketch of a New England farm:
The winter deepening, the hay all in
The barn fat with cattle, the apple crop
Conveyed to market for the fragrant bin
He thinks the time has come to make a stop
And sinks half-grudging in his firelit seat
Though with his heavy body’s full consent
In what would be the posture of defeat
But for that look of rigorous content
Outside, the night dies down like one great cow
Against his cast-off clothing where it stands
Up to his knees in miles of hustled snow,
Flapping and jumping like a kind of fire,
And floating skyward its abandoned hands
In gestures of invincible desire.
–from “Sonnet”
“Sonnet” is essentially Wilbur 101: organic in language, empathetic without being fey, lyrically expansive within the framework of form without sacrificing the form or the framework. As stunning as “Sonnet” and numerous other fixed verses are, I was surprised to find that the best poems of World were free verse, despite Wilbur’s frequently-expressed distaste for the genre. The book’s finest form poems dazzle, but only in declaration; when Wilbur puts the emphasis on landscape instead of his personal voice, the language becomes constricted. Yet look what he does with backdrop in the opening lines of “Marginalia”, his subtle ode to a New England creek:
Things concentrate at the edges: the pond surface
Is borne to fish and man and it is spread
In textile scum and damask light, on which
The lily pads are set; and there is also
Inlaid unruddy twigs, becalmed pine leaves
Air-baubles, and the chain mail of froth
–from “Marginalia”
And in one of his few non-pastorals, the sublime title poem of the book:
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing
–from “Things of this World”
Freed from rhyme, his scenery becomes richer, deeper, full of imagery that is uniquely his own. Even his lyric lines, the cornerstone to all of Wilbur’s great poetry, are finer and more natural, achieving more in a less ambitious format. “Marginalia” and the title poem are Wilbur at his absolute best, showing him not as a symbol against modernism nor as a gatekeeper for the old ways, but as a poet with his own individual voice, as fine as any American poet in the 20th century.
Finishing World, I wanted to indignantly bristle against the criticism that Wilbur had devolved into a traditionalist Yankee dullard in the past 50 years. After finishing his collected poems, however, I felt sorry that I couldn’t. In Wilbur’s later poems, he assumes the mantle of “man of the system,” a standard bearer against the confessional works of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. His poetry suffered, retreating into well-worn form patterns with well-worn themes. Too often he would fall back on easy ideas and lines, like the beginning ones in his ode to a tree:
You might not know this old tree by its bark
Which once was striated, smooth, and glossy dark
So deep now are the rifts which separate
Its roughened surface into flake and plate
–from “Black Birch in Winter”
and his benign paean to strikebreaking:
It is not yet the time for the rock, the bullet, the blunt
Slogan that fuddles the mind toward force
Let the new sound in our streets be the patient sound
Of your discourse.
–from “Response to the Student Strikers”
These lines are fine, full of moderate feeling and sentiment, but the dissipation in quality and craft is more than noticeable. This more recent Wilbur is a good, thoughtful person who, like many good thoughtful people, mistakes his decency for artistic sweat. Both “Birch In Winter” and “Student Strikers” are gentle in temperament, yet affixed in tone and content even for the standards of the nature and polemical poem; lacking every one of the dark aspects about the personal poetry of Lowell, Plath, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton save the riveting, uncontrollable sense of the unexpected that made their best poems work.
But every Wilbur book is worth your time, containing more than a few flashes of brilliance and a commitment to the highest ideals in craft and ethics. For those who believe that American literature, for all its flaws, is worth studying, and that craft in poetry means more than personality, background, or ability to shock, Richard Wilbur’s poetry is a balm. Things of this World is Wilbur at his finest, containing some of the most exquisitely crafted poems I have ever read. If one wants to understand poetry — American poetry in particular — Wilbur is required reading.
October 24, 2019
As always with Richard Wilbur, eloquent language and skillful use of rhyming, meter, and forms of poetry. This is his third collection, written in the 1950s. He was not by any means a daring poet, but I don't think he needs to be. He is a craftsman with words and his greatness lies in his formalism. Although he was a pushback against Modernism, I don't think of him in those terms. Listen to the language; his poems give pleasure and that is good enough.
April 4, 2015
It is solid poetry, but no poem grabbed me and demanded to be re-read.
There is nothing more individual than reading poetry, one man's genius could be someone's else's meh.
It feels too formal to me too.
I do like more immediacy in my poetry.
Still though, it's always good to try new poets.
p.s. Read it again and still feel the same.
There is nothing more individual than reading poetry, one man's genius could be someone's else's meh.
It feels too formal to me too.
I do like more immediacy in my poetry.
Still though, it's always good to try new poets.
p.s. Read it again and still feel the same.
August 21, 2011
This wasn't as good as Ceremony. Plus I just didn't care for the theme of this collection and the way the author handled it. Everything seemed too obvious and limited.
November 4, 2017
Favorite book by this master poet
January 29, 2018
Especially liked “Digging to China” and “Looking into History”
March 23, 2020
“Newtonian numbers set to cosmic lyres/Whelmed us in whirling worlds we could not know,/And by the imagined floods of our desires/The voice of Sirens gave us vertigo” (15).
Read
May 20, 2022Not my favorite book of poetry: “Love Calls Us to the Things of this World” absolutely makes up for it though
February 15, 2016
Let me start off by saying solid poetry.
There's was nothing that was bad per se.
The style was simple but not mediocre.
The poems themselves were very interesting. Their meaning what never completely obvious. Reading required work and patience, especially since several of his poems hinged on the last line or so.
Pelicanus was awkward. Other than that, good poetry.
My only complaint is not necessarily a criticism but an opinion, there was nothing exceptional in the poetry.
There's was nothing that was bad per se.
The style was simple but not mediocre.
The poems themselves were very interesting. Their meaning what never completely obvious. Reading required work and patience, especially since several of his poems hinged on the last line or so.
Pelicanus was awkward. Other than that, good poetry.
My only complaint is not necessarily a criticism but an opinion, there was nothing exceptional in the poetry.
July 16, 2014
Great formal skill of course, but too often in the service of mere prettiness, commentary not inspiration.
February 25, 2021
"Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," "Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning," and "A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciara" were really splendid.
Wilbur's pace and simplicity never get old.
Wilbur's pace and simplicity never get old.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews