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In his exploratory study of modern American poets, economist David Galenson limited his analysis to 11 outstanding innovators who averaged more than three poems per anthology. Of the 11, five were finders and six were seekers. The five conceptual poets range from level-headed Richard Wilbur to suicidal Sylvia Plath and institutionalized Ezra Pound, but they all achieved their greatest successes at a young age. Typical traits of finders that can be found in this group’s reliance on literary traditions, focus on the poet’s interior life, and works based on the poet’s distinctive ideas about what poetry should be like.
Richard Wilbur, 1921- : lyrical young genius with staying power
In his graceful, precise, sophisticated poems, finder Richard Wilbur concentrates more on the forms of po
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Richard Wilbur, young writer of
‘jewel-like’ verse
This excerpt from one of Wilbur’s most popular poems, written in his late 20s, shows his elegant approach to what could seem a mundane topic.
The Death of a Toad
A toad the power mower caught,
Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got
To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him
Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade
Of the ashen and heartshaped leaves, in a dim,
Low, and a final glade. ...
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etry than on observation of the world. For Wilbur, “the subject of the poem need not be in any sense great; the death of a toad would do nicely. … This was art, not life,” said critic Sacvan Bercovitch.
That’s a reference to Wilbur’s often reprinted “The Death of a Toad” --18 lines of a precise six-line rhyme scheme that compress into three identically shaped musical stanzas a treasure box of rhetorical devices, a fantasy of an amphibian afterlife, and suggestions that the lawn is emasculated and the day itself is dying. Rather than taking a conversational approach, the poem uses formal language – words such as “verge,” “sanctuaried” and “glade,” for example.
That vocabulary is fine for conceptual innovator Wilbur, but would never meet the standard set by experimental innovator Frost: “I would never use a word or combination of words that I hadn’t heard used in running speech.”
In general, critics describe Wilbur with the sort of praise that’s common for a successful finder but rarely applies to a seeker. He is “witty, versatile, good-humored, intelligent, and technically dazzling,” says critic Donald B. Stauffer. He writes “elegant, exquisitely regular, jewel-like verse,” says Bercovitch.
No work by Wilbur is in the list of the top 20 most frequently reprinted poems, but Wilbur places No. 11 among modern American poets with the most frequently anthologized poems overall. Like most successful conceptual innovators, Wilbur started early. Of the 153 antholog y entries by Wilbur, about a third were from before age 32.
In contrast to the typical finder who has little to offer after a burst of youthful innovations, Wilbur’s successes continued into middle age.
In terms of poems selected for anthologies, ages 47 and 55 were two of his six best years (along with ages 26, 27, 29 and 34). As time passed, however, the magnitude of his successes declined.
Of all the Wilbur poems reprinted in anthologies, 38 percent are from his twenties and 31 percent from his thirties. Only 13 percent are from his forties, 12 percent from his fifties and 6 percent from his sixties.
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