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When most of the U.S. Armys 36th Texans division shipped from
Marseilles to Newport News in mid-October 1945, Sta Sergeant
Richard Wilbur remained behind with the occupation forces in
Germany. The army had transferred Wilbur, without explanation,
from his post as code technician to the automatic weapons unit of
an artillery battery a position for which he was completely
untrained and unqualied. This delay in his return home might
have been a superiors retaliation for twenty-one feisty columns
Wilbur had published in The T-Patch, his divisions newspaper,
one of which expressed bemusement that a major would wear
riding boots and carry a crop and a pearl-handled revolver in the
absence of horses or enemies.
With happier abruptness, he was sent to Marseilles in midNovember to board a troop transport, and on the 29th he was honorably discharged from active duty at Camp Edison, New Jersey.
That same evening he arrived at a Manhattan hotel, where his
wife, Charlee, was waiting. When asked years later to name the
hotel, he condently remembered that it was the Plaza. Charlee
corrected him. The hotel, near Times Square, charged by the hour,
and she had brought her own bed linens; such accommodations
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tember 1947, just twenty months after their arrival at Harvard, the
young poet John Brinnin, who would become the Wilburs lifelong
friend, summed up their appeal in his journal:
The Wilbur years had begun. The meaning of the term
would vary. But its common factor would be the incessantly
portable party spirit Dick and Charlee had maintained since
the time of their courtship. He at Amherst, she at Smith,
theyd met at the western end of the college highway and,
to some less than beguiled observers, had never left it. But
like everyone else these killjoys were glad to sit at their table,
tag along on their midnight forays into the jazz joints of
Columbus Avenue, play their word games and, above all, bask
in the radiance of success and normality they brought to lives
with precious and small purchase on either.
Shortly after their arrival on Plympton Street the Wilburs met
Andr du Bouchet, an introduction probably initiated by Armour
Craig or Theodore Baird, another Amherst professor and friend
(both had taught du Bouchet during the war). Wilbur reported to
Craig in February 1946 the exhilaration, as well as the tribulation,
du Bouchet brought into their circle.
Andr . . . has been a regular visitor, & we enjoy him a great
deal. . . . Charlee is now taking a course of reading under him,
beginning with Gides Les Caves du Vatican. Andrs attitudes are so opposite to mine, or at any rate so absolute, that
we have the most animated disputes. His own criticism I can
only dene as writing a poem to criticize a poem. It comes,
very often, to How wonderful! but quite as often to something creative in itself. As Existentialist, he upbraids me for
justifying Empsonian Criticism [i.e., literary criticism based
on close textual reading and which excludes social, autobiographical or political contexts] as a ne teaching method
I am not to think of myself as a potential teacher but as an
individual. At any rate, Andrs mordant attacks & personal
energy have given us a pleasant shaking, & set us to dreaming, over late beer, of a year at the Sorbonne.
Du Bouchets most immediate and dramatic impact on Wilburs
life was his expression of enthusiasm for Wilburs poetry, as WilR
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from the air. That all passes and nothing stays is a thing
admitted, agreed to; on the other hand we always pretend of
some things that they are changeless a spiritual legerdemain and so keep calm. But calling at a house and nding
all the people gone, or seeing a woman terribly beautiful, or
the tall cons of strong men who have died strength
stoops to the grave teaches you mutability again. And you
run to rhyme to heal the horror of it.
The phrase you run to rhyme captures the power physiological as well as emotional of a poem to heal, both for the person
who writes it and the person who reads it. Several of Wilburs war
poems, particularly Tywater, The Eyes of an SS Ocer and
Mined Country, were early attempts of his own to come to terms
with (or nd relief from) violent wartime experiences. The idea of
mutability, much on Wilburs mind in this notebook, is inherent
in the texture of The Beautiful Changes. Louise Bogan noticed and
referred to an aspect of it, writing that Wilburs delicate adjustments convey delity to Nature. At Harvard the mutations of
fortune he encountered were almost all auspicious. One so altered
his approach to academic study at Harvard, and to the role poetry
played in it, that it changed the trajectory of his career.
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Society had its origins in the admiration of several Harvard professors in the 1920s for the Prize Fellows program of Trinity College, Cambridge. Trinity would conduct a yearly competition
among its graduates to identify men most likely to make important advances in the sciences and the great humanistic disciplines,
such as classics and philology. Trinitys Prize Fellows program
succeeded spectacularly. According to a 1926 report presented at
Harvard by a committee of four that included Lawrence Joseph
Henderson, a professor of biological chemistry who was instrumental in shaping the Society of Fellows, one-half of the British
Nobel Prize winners, one-fth of the civil members of the Orders
of Merit, and four of the ve Foulerton Research Professors of the
Royal Society were Trinity Fellows.
Trinitys practice of singling out its own exceptionally promising students (and supporting them for up to six years as they
worked on whatever interested them), intrigued Henderson and
Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Harvards president. Both were extremely forceful men (Hendersons method in discussion, one of
his colleagues said, was feebly imitated by the piledriver). Both
sensed something was amiss in American graduate education.
What bothered them at Harvard was the institutions lack of success in producing scholars who made intellectual breakthroughs.
Too often they had observed even the brightest and most adventurous graduate students succumb to pressure to choose a safe
dissertation topic and accept the safe academic berth it assured.
Lowell and Henderson decided to treat this vexing situation as an
opportunity. In 1926, Lowell appointed Henderson and several
other Harvard professors, as well as a member of the universitys
Board of Overseers, to develop a program that would identify the
most promising original minds in Harvards graduate programs,
gather them together for frequent conversations facilitated by
regular meetings at lunch and dinner, and support them with
living accommodations, oces, and a salary equivalent to that of
an assistant professor. Lowell in particular was insistent on making the amenities and the money attractive. He saw no reason not
to incorporate capitalist principles into his academic regime. Traditional scholarly success was explicitly downplayed as the decisive
qualication for membership in the Society.
Lowell did not succeed immediately in his eort to persuade
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the Harvard overseers to fund his idea. And during the Depression, it proved impossible to nd a benefactor who would provide
an endowment that would force the overseers hand. So Lowell
took matters into his own hands, resigned as Harvards president,
and donated, anonymously, more than a million dollars in 1933 to
launch the Society of Fellows, whose success in identifying genius
soon rivaled that of its Trinity inspiration.
Both Wilbur and Tom Wilcox were nominees for membership
in the Society when the Senior Fellows voted in spring 1947. An
incident that deeply distressed both friends occurred when Wilcox
picked up the mail delivered to 22 Plympton from the hall table,
spied the Societys return address on an envelope, looked cursorily
at the rst three letters of the addressees name, and tore open the
letter. His heart leapt at the initial pleased to inform you phrase.
But as he read on he realized that the letter had been addressed to
Wilbur, and that he had not in fact been awarded a Junior Fellowship. Wilcoxs expectations had been high. He had received excellent grades during his rst semesters at Harvard. At Amherst his
critically prescient senior honors essay on American proletarian
novelists, combined with his grades, earned him a degree magna
cum laude, while Wilbur, though he received four As and a B his
senior year, got no honors. But since his arrival at Harvard, Wilbur
had established a reputation not only as an accomplished poet but
also as a serious and original scholar in both literature and art
history.
The Senior Fellows task, based on Trinity tradition, was to
identify applicants who possessed not only brilliance in their disciplines, but also enough imagination and impatience to extend its
reach or revolutionize its assumptions. Since 1933 the Society has
been remarkably successful in this mission. Though the letters
supporting Wilburs candidacy are sealed until 2027, it is likely
that F. O. Matthiessen, I. A. Richards, and Frederick Deknatel
wrote on his behalf. Wilbur believes that his essay Degas and the
Subject, written for Deknatels course in nineteenth-century European painting, helped convince the Senior Fellows to vote in his
favor. The essay expertly deployed and extended the vocabulary of art history, suggesting that Wilbur could easily have shifted
his graduate work to that eld.
Wilburs primary purpose in the essay was to establish Edgar
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being boldly emotional or thoughty. He deals with the moment, the transient impression, the brief perception, and so
his art [has] subtle hints of sacramental signicance. The
dandy artist despises the public and commercialism. He does
not belong to any literary or artistic movement. He is essentially religious in a mystical fashion; politically and socially
he is an absolute conservative.
Wilburs portrait of the Baudelaire-Degas incarnation of the
dandy, while not intended as a poetic or personal manifesto, does
foreshadow some of his later convictions and attitudes, particularly the high standards he set for himself in literary and personal
life, his reserve when expressing emotion, and his search for religious illumination in the everyday world, all of which became
permanent aspects of his professional and poetic character. On the
other hand, his social life was fairly freewheeling, and he was
never a prig or, in modern political terms, a conservative. But
Baudelaires version of dandyism, which condemned bourgeois
taste while insisting on rigorous elegance and integrity, became for
Wilbur a permanent touchstone, and it helps explain his later
refusal to participate in the confessional, the Beat, or the agitprop
antiwar movements that began to dominate American poetry in
the late 1950s. The nature of the dandy (and certainly Beau Brummells success) derived entirely from his aect and sartorial style,
which, very much like Wilburs own, attracted notice not for its
bravura or ostentation but for its understated nesse. Dandy
became Baudelaires shorthand for a dedicated artist, and in 1947
Jean-Paul Sartre incorporated aspects of Baudelaires version of
dandyism into a book-length appreciation.
This examination of dandyism, had Wilbur pursued it as a possible dissertation subject, would have begun with Beau Brummells
rise, reign, and disgrace. Hed already written a poem in 1946 about
Brummells last years in Caen Wilbur had visited the city while
still a soldier, in July 1945 the safe haven to which Brummell had
absconded from unrepayable debts incurred during his years of unparalleled social success and inuence. But after several editors he
trusted rejected Brummell in Caen, including Andr du Bouchet,
Wilbur accepted its lack of distinction and put the poem aside and
he did the same for dandyism as a topic of research.
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he plucks verbs from their usual contexts and places them where
they give new energy and nuance, as in In the Elegy Season,
with lines that refer to fallen leaves: Haze, char, and the weather
of All Souls: / A giant absence mopes upon the trees. In The
Sirens, Wilbur dramatizes wanderlust as a physical force that
energizes a normally plaintive verb: a town and its streetlights
yearn for his company, forlornly pleading, Stay.
I never knew the road
From which the whole earth didnt call away,
With wild birds rounding the hill crowns,
Haling out of the heart an old dismay,
Or the shore somewhere pounding its slow code,
Or low-lighted towns
Seeming to tell me, stay.
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vard graduate who later founded New Directions. Its local contributors included, besides John Ciardi, Robert Lowell, and Wilbur,
three poets who soon became the Wilburs friends: John Malcolm
Brinnin, who did his graduate work at Harvard and taught for a
time at Vassar; Howard Moss, who became poetry editor of The
New Yorker in 1948; and Jacqueline (Jackie) Steiner, who had been
chosen by Vassar in her senior year to represent the school in the
Irene Glascock poetry competition at Mount Holyoke, was currently studying both poetry and singing, and was for a time the
partner of du Bouchet.
Throughout each academic year visiting literary celebrities performed on campus. In the notebook Wilbur began to keep in 1946,
he reected on the competitiveness such visits unleashed within
Harvards literati, a set from which he did not exclude himself:
The person most resented is he who acts with precisely our own
motives, but openly: we feel a vicarious exposure, and that is
painful. . . . Cambridge is full of lionizers, & . . . when the Sitwells
come to town there is the beastliest sort of scramble to meet them,
and much sour grapes from those who fail to.
Wilbur compared the appearance of a celebrity at a huge reception to the breaking up of a billiards rack: the celebrity rockets like
a white cue ball into a rack of tightly packed multi-hued admirers,
scattering celebrity seekers every which way, a dispersal from
which some never recover as the reception progresses and thus
never edge close enough to the celebrity to come away with an
anecdote. Dick and Charlee did, in fact, meet two Sitwells, Edith
and her brother Sir Osbert, in late winter 1949 when Richard
Eberhart and his wife, Helen, invited them to a small gathering.
Edith, apparently, did not have quite the force of Wilburs imaginary cue ball; when she read her poems, according to The Crimson, her voice was nearly inaudible and her poems dicult to
grasp. Wilbur was nevertheless enough impressed by what he
knew of her work to want her to think well of his. His friend Jack
Sweeney, the astute and benevolent curator of the Lamont Librarys Poetry Room, presented her with a copy of The Beautiful
Changes after she expressed interest in Wilburs work. In his notebook Wilbur recorded pleasure but also apprehension, wishing
hed been able to tear out many of its pages.
Wilbur found, almost daily, quiet and congenial moments to
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that Wilbur could nd an alternative rhyme that clicked with Lautrec. But from the fact squads point of view, Toulouse was the
least of the problems. They also indicted the poems nal image.
Museum Piece
The good gray guardians of art
Patrol the halls on spongy shoes,
Impartially protective, though
Perhaps suspicious of Toulouse.
Here dozes one against the wall,
Disposed upon a funeral chair.
A Degas dancer pirouettes
Upon the parting of his hair.
See how she spins! The grace is there,
But strain as well is plain to see.
Degas loved the two together:
Beauty joined to energy.
Edgar Degas purchased once
A ne El Greco, which he kept
Against the wall beside his bed
To hang his pants on while he slept.
No one at The New Yorker could document that Degas hung his
trousers on an El Greco painting that stood near his bed. Here is
how De Vries framed the issue for Wilbur: The New Yorker had
from its inception a policy of never printing anything as fact that
it could not document and thus remain immune to criticism.
Wilbur dropped everything and tried to establish that his image
was indeed solidly factual. He answered De Vries:
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two Grecos, did have pictures against his bedroom wall, and
used to ing his clothes at the servant Zoe, which argues he
didnt hang them up in a closet from a seated position in bed.
No one to whom I have spoken has attributed the story to, or
thought [it] more characteristic of, another painter. Another
Degas expert, Mr. John Ringwald, contributed this: Unfortunately I am not able to conrm the truth of your Degas
anecdote, of which I have never heard before. However,
Degas did own two paintings by El Greco, may have kept one
in his bedroom, and was almost blind during the last ten
years of his life. I cannot see why your publishers would not
allow you some poetic license.
Wilbur added: The defense rests. Any defense, however, that
invoked poetic license was unlikely to carry weight chez The
New Yorker. Its editors did, however, try to badger him into ruining the poem. They proposed, to keep this story in the realm of
hearsay, to admit that it might be apocryphal, and suggested
changing Wilburs line Edgar Degas purchased once to its said
that Degas once possessed. Wilbur stood his ground. My reasons
are poetic. I think that to remove the abruptness of Edgar Degas
purchased once would greatly injure the subtlety of the sequence
of associations which constitute the poem. I have, of course, no
interest in perpetrating a minor anecdotal fraud; but I think this
use of a highly probable anecdote entirely justiable poetically.
After somewhat recklessly implying that anyone who disagreed
that poetic truth trumped literal fact was mad, Wilbur ended his
brief with the following sentence: I hope that you will not nd
my disinclination to change the poem to be unreasonable. The
New Yorker editors did nd it unreasonable and returned the
poem, which Poetry magazine was happy to publish immediately,
along with six others by Wilbur. And in good time Wilbur found
documentation in Randall Jarrells library that entirely supported
the fact that Edgar Degas nightly hung his trousers on one of his
two El Grecos.
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in August 1947 to tour Europe but found postwar Paris so stimulating and inexpensive that they settled there. When Dick and Charlee arrived on the Mauritania in April 1948, the Geists introduced
them to the pleasures and personalities of Paris, including its
bistros and easygoing lifestyle. Charlee, pregnant but not due until
October, intended to enjoy herself; after a night at the Bal Ngre
she wrote: It is a truly fantastic place where the music is hot
Negro jazz with a Martinique twist and causes immediate madness in all who listen. One dances naturally with excellent Senegalese and West Indian Negroes. We stayed until 3 AM and I
danced myself silly with no one latching to the fact that I was
pregnant: a triumph that I am being a perfect shit about.
Paris was an exhilarating and instructive experience for the
Wilburs. What impressed them most was not the artistic avantgarde though they met many of its major gures but the
peaceful and dedicated atmosphere in which all the poets, novelists, and visual artists they met seemed to live and work. They did
not nd, or engage, in the political and philosophical conict that
cultural historians associate with postwar Paris. It was this serious
serenity that most pleased them about the city. But Pariss most
enduring inuences on Wilbur, though he would not realize their
importance until four years later, were the productions of Molire
he witnessed at the Comdie-Franaise.
Through the Geists, the Wilburs soon met the sculptor Alberto
Giacometti and the artist Jean Hlion, who lent Wilbur his guitar.
At parties Wilbur was easily persuaded to strum and sing. He
favored the blues, a genre he heard often during two summers
riding the rails as a college student during the Depression, spending nights at encampments of tramps and wayfaring families.
Hlions style was eclectic, most often combining early-twentieth-century gurative with surrealistic situations for example,
a bespectacled man on a sidewalk reads a newspaper while on a
nearby mattress a naked and despondent woman suers. Pierre
Schneider (an art historian who was inducted as a Junior Fellow in
the same cohort as Wilbur) and du Bouchet provided contacts not
only to other American expatriates but to practicing French poets,
artists, and the editor of Transition, an avant-garde magazine, who
commissioned Wilbur to translate two French poems by Henri
Pichette titled Apome 1 and Apome 2.
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To Wilburs circle, and many other circles beyond Harvard, Matthiessen was both revered and controversial. His membership in
leftist groups he may or may not have known were Communist
fronts made him a target of anti-Communists. Matthiessen was
universally respected in academia, and his homosexuality was
never an outright issue at Harvard, although the social climate of
the late 1940s was decades away from open acceptance of gays.
When Matthiessen realized that he had fallen in love with a man
twenty years his senior and wanted to live with him, he appealed
for guidance to his Yale cohort in Skull & Bones, asking whether he
should resist or yield to his love. (One custom of Skull & Bones, as
with other Yale senior societies, is a requirement that members
recount their autobiographies and bare their souls to the other
members. So Matthiessens summoning his brethren to help resolve a life crisis well into his thirties is not as strange as it may
seem.) They listened and then gave him their blessing. When Matthiessens partner died in 1945 he was suddenly lonely, and John
Brinnin (for one) knew hed been diagnosed as clinically depressed.
Brinnin, among others, tried and failed to help Matthiessen
nd another partner. A few months after one such introduction,
Matthiessen jumped to his death. Brinnin described his reaction in
his journal:
April 1, 1950. Westport. 7 a.m. Flip on the bedside radio.
Matty a suicide in Boston. A fall from 10th oor of a fourth
rate hotel. On windowsill his Phi Beta Kappa key . . . wristwatch, Skull & Bones insignia.
Phone V. in Poughkeepsie, his rst thought mine: grief
unassuagable. Says reporters will play with contributing
factors . . . anything but truth. Man died of broken heart.
Period.
Matthiessen had accepted an invitation to the Wilburs for the
evening of 1 April. He informed them in a telegram dated at 6:00
a.m. that morning:
taken sick unable to have dinner very sorry
matty
Matthiessens suicide note gave his severe depressions (which he
had endured for ten years after a nervous breakdown caused by
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something queer and true that Blake said on the same subject: You never know what is enough unless you know what
is more than enough. Mr. Wilbur never goes too far, but he
never goes far enough. In the most serious sense of the word
he is not a very satisfactory poet. And yet he seems the best of
the quite young poets writing in this country.
About a year before Jarrells review appeared in the Partisan
Review in its NovemberDecember 1951 issue, Wilbur and Jarrell
had spent time together at a poetry conference. In his Cambridge
notebook Wilbur recorded his impression of Jarrell:
[He] has written poetry reviews of the greatest acerbity:
there is none more cutting unless it is Berryman. And yet in
person Jarrell is slow, modest, full of well-I-dont-knows and
boyish ers and ahs. Of course one must look hard at such
people. After two days of quiet talk and deference from
Jarrell I noticed a transient glint in his eye, & for a moment
glimpsed the tomahawk man. The same thing with Marianne Moore, who after an hour of backwatering will tip you
overboard with a sudden self-assertion. These people are
perhaps surest and stubbornest of all. Modesty can be a kind
of self-conservation, a not giving others anything to go on.
Wilbur himself was seldom ready to give others much to go on.
But whats striking about Jarrells review is not the obvious intent
of the tomahawk man to take a scalp but the failure of Jarrell to
cite the poems or the passages where Wilbur was playing it
safe. Other reviewers who wrote retrospective commentaries on
his rst few books, notably Clive James and Robert F. Sayre, implicitly respond to Jarrell by plumbing the depths of Wilburs
poems, both lyric and narrative, instead of announcing from a
levee their shallowness. Jarrells challenge stung, however, and
Wilbur included in his later books longer and more deantly
ambitious poems than he had in Ceremony.
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project and he and his family could enjoy New Mexicos culture,
climate, and reputation for inspiring artists. They rented part of a
multi-family one-story pueblo, sharing with a family whose descendants had settled the town and given it its ocial name,
Sandoval. Wilbur wrote A Plain Song for Comadre about Bruna
Sandoval, who lived with her son in the pueblo, after watching her
clean the church of San Ysidro from the clay porch to the white
altar. / For love and in all weather, this is what she has done. It is
one of the pre-Rome poems in which Wilbur admits a surge of
Christian feeling into his work: Sometimes the early sun / Shines
as she ings the scrubwater out, with a crash / Of grimy rainbows
and the stained suds ash / Like angel-feathers.
In a letter to his Amherst fraternity brother Rab Brooks, a
former Junior Fellow and currently a classics professor at Harvard,
Wilbur gave a detailed account of life on the edge of the desert
stretching westward, mountains and mesas on the horizon, and
the Rio Grande a few hundreds yards east.
We are established about 10 miles from Albuquerque, now
supposed to be the fastest growing city in the state. There is
considerable ocular evidence to support this contention; I
have never seen any urbs which looked so little urban or
urbane. It sits in what we Easterners would call desert, and
amounts at rst sight to a great wash of neon on either side of
Route 66. Utterly planless; miles of motels, Laundrettes,
Kwik-Kleaners, Ozone Heights developments. The two bits
of the city which seem to reect some taste & leisured planning are the University, beautifully done in southwestern
style, and the old Plaza, a single square of the old town which
the speculators have not been permitted to raze. Fortunately,
however, a ve-minute drive out of town brings one to beautiful country; in most directions to undulant grazing land,
mesas and mountains; in our direction, which is north, to
Spanish American farming country. We live in Sandoval,
more generally called Corrales (because it used to be a mess
of corrals). All houses are small adobes with dirt yards and
great cottonwood trees above & about them; between which
are elds of alfalfa, melons, tomatoes, grapes and chili peppers. At this time of year all the adobe walls are hung with
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great looping chains of ristras of chilis. Hanging over Corrales though actually quite far away is Sandia, or Watermelon Mountain, one of the Sangre de Cristo chain, and this
morning it wears a bit of snow. . . .
As for the dance at Jemez I had expected to see something
quite alien and merely curious, but found it an experience
more overpowering than any high mass could be. Two squads
of dancers, each with its chorus of old men, the rst squad
being the Summer People & stained squash-ower color,
the second the blue Winter People. Behind each male dancer
a woman in dark clothing: the men dance with a pounding
step, alternating feet with the double hop on either; the
women, since they represent the earth-principal, never raise
their feet from the ground, but shue. Men and women are
decked with r balsam boughs; the women wave such
boughs in either hand, the men have rattles.
I suppose that the term corn dance is really a way of saying
fertility dance: there was not much corn in evidence, save on
the rooftops of the adobes along the plaza of the Pueblo, &
dry stalks in the lofts. The dance appears to be nonseasonal or
rather all seasonal, an attempt to embrace the whole cycle of
the year, & so the balsam, being evergreen, seems more appropriate than corn.
Corrales was invigorating, as Wilbur wrote to Brooks, with 10 or
more roosters to hail the dawn, and Wilbur was able to devise a
plausible plot for his original play. But the essential dramatic
momentum, along with interest in conict and character, seemed
to vanish when he began to write dialogue. Charlee, who read
Dicks pages as he completed them, immediately identied the
problem: Dick had created a now habitual voice that dominated
every poem he composed. When trying to invent other voices they
all sounded like his. Consequently, faced with doppelgngers for
dramatis personae, he found it extremely dicult to generate the
palpable conict essential to a play.
Seeking a way out of this impasse, Wilbur thought back to what
had inspired him to try to write plays in the rst place: his and
Charlees enthrallment by the lively Parisian theater, particularly
the Comdie-Franaise. Molires masterpieces had especially imR
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B A G G
R I C H A R D
W I L B U R S
C A M B R I D G E
Y E A R S
Robert Bagg wishes to thank Richard Wilbur and Ellen Wilbur for recovering,
and granting him access to, Wilbur family letters and documents, as well as the
archivists who have assisted his research at Amherst College, the University of
Delaware, and Harvard University.
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