New and Collected Poems.

WHATEVER SPINS AROUND

WHO'S WHO listed Richard Purdy Wilbur (b. 1921) as "educator, writer," not anticipating the Poet Laureatcy (whatever that means) of the United States. To be Poet Laureate of England can be a grim task; of Ted Hughes it has already exacted nearly worse than it did of Tennyson, 15 stanzas on the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, of which the nadir is perhaps

Dance, dance, as Eve and Adam Kicked their worries off

In Paradise, before they heard God politely cough.... --So far down could the ventriloquist of Crow be dragged.

Wilbur on an uplifting occasion can be defter than that. For the Statue of Liberty's centennial he provided text for a cantata, e.g.,

Now is our lady's honor Come dance on freedom's ground, And do the waltz or polka, Whatever spins around.... --Now there's a mind spinning free as a maple-key, while William Schuman's music will have gone pu PAH pu PAH pu PAH.

Still, Wilbur confronting august Ms. Liberty was as little himself as Hughes rapt by broad-beamed Fergie. Unloaded of tons of bronze. Wilbur's Muse is happy to disclose sterling credentials. She's of yeoman Victorian stock, with prestidigitators in her pedigree: John Hookham Frere, Tom Hood. In an era (Coleridge, Tennyson, Swinburne) when English poetry was mounting aesthetic hilltops, letting go all touch with the immediate, decking Generality's grandeur in vacuous sound, a grip on particulars Crabbe and Wordsworth had prized took refuge in London cellars, to suffer disdain as "light verse." W. S. Gilbert helped keep it alive (and the Queen, who knighted Sullivan, left knighting Gilbert to her feckless son). By the 1930s Auden was dragging that be-draggled tradition back up toward respectability.

Wilbur admires Auden, justly; he "sustained the civil tongue/In a scattering time." Still, Auden's particularity did tend to be of a newspaper order, something his wit could distance itself from the way you can drop the Times with a wry shrug. By his day, if you put the specific into rhymed and metered lines you were next expected to perform a juggling act, and he hadn't the radical originality to subvert that expectation. He'd even concede, as Wilbur also seems to, that poetry has always been (really) a kind of game.

What a poet tends to think poetry is, really, will come out when he deals with predecessor poets. So here's Richard Wilbur (1969) "doing" Villon, a kind of exercise he returns to every so often:

O tell me where, in lands or seas, Flora, that Roman belle, has strayed, Thais, or Archipiades, Who put each other in the shade, Or Echo who by bank and glade ave back the crying of the hound, And whose sheer beauty could not fade. But where shall last year's snow be found?

Beside that, Rossetti's "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" is, yes, oratorical, unidiomatic. "Yesteryear," forsooth. Wilbur's speech comes trippingly off any tongue unperplexed by the original. But

Dictes moy ou, n'en quel pays Est Flora la belle Rommaine...

We see how the translator has contributed "seas" and "strayed," and it's he who has pitched the whole thing in the key of "O," and has diminished, ever so wittily, "la belle Rommaine" to "that Roman belle" (she was a courtesan, Juvenal tells us): all to get an agreeable ease far from Villon's grim thought.* Villon's point is that Flora is dead, not that she's "strayed." And here's Villon used as occasion for a Victor Borge order of virtuosity. Which is not to be snoozed at.

Wilbur offers a clutch of very neat translations, notable for the way they do tend to be occasions. It's not that, somehow or other, you and I must take the force of some overwhelming utterance from an alien tongue. No, it's that Villon or Charles d'Orleans or Voltaire has provided our gentleman poet, this afternoon, with something to do that indeed he does do quite well.

The death of a toad (it got chopped by a power mower) was likewise an occasion, for orotund phrases ("misted and ebullient seas"; "lost Amphibia's emperies"). I remember how that so upset a critic that in his delirium he kept calling the toad a frog. And I do see what upset him. But note: I) plead inexperience: it's a four-decades-ago poem; 2) even so early, Wilbur could specify "the power mower" that "chewed and clipped" the toad's leg. Wilbur did lapse into Swinburnisms. But could Swinburne, ever, have called, say, a punch-press by name?

What he has long since arrived at is an enviable sureness, an eveness of performance that doesn't lapse, that seems not to fumble for rhymes, that can draw syntax out the length of several stanzas or else box it in crisply. The quotidian doesn't bore him, and he's untempted by bardic postures. The opening of "C Minor" will illustrate:

Beethoven during breakfast? The human soul,

Though stalked by hollow pluckings, winning out

(While bran-flakes crackle in the cereal-bowl)

Over despair and doubt?

you are right to switch it off, and let the day

Begin at hazard, perhaps with peckerknocks

In the sugar bush, the rancor of a jay, Or in the letter box

Something that makes you pause and with fixed shadow

Stand on the driveway gravel, your bent head

Scanning the snatched pages until the sad

Or fortunate news is read....

"There is nothing to do with a day except to live it": that's where this poem is headed, and it rings true. And note the bran-flakes and the driveway gravel, the very stuff, many still think, of the unpoetic. It's much to be so comfortably free of the notion that only moons, stars, and seas are worthy of mention.

And yet for all its deftness it's unambitious verse: verse unpropelled by any such radical originality as that of Wilbur's countryman William Carlos Williams, who for all you could tell from reading through this large collection might as well not have existed or paid heed to that broken green bottle in a cinder-heap, that red wheel-barrow glazed with rain water, those blighted scraggly bushes is March. For poetry and the details of everydayness in fact resumed housekeeping a long generation ago. The condition was that poetry give up boozing, and accept a vocation of fierce honesty.

Richard Wilbur is content with a less contentious liaison, between the quotidian and the graceful performance. He'll not disgrace his new office and it won't disgrace him. Whether pouring the White House cereal becomes Barbara's lot or Kitty's, he'll be just the man to be taking decorous notice.