Verse chronicle June 2011
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The perennially boyish Richard Wilbur may be the first American poet to write decent verse at ninety—most poets have trouble at seventy, or fifty, or thirty. Sophocles wrote Oedipus at Colonus at ninety, but poems of grace and depth are more likely to be written when the poet is still young and foolish. Wilbur was never the darkest of American poets—a kind of moral sunniness was always breaking in. He was sunny the way Frost can be sunny, though Frost is sunny only by cutting out three-quarters of his poems. Wilbur was the Frost left over, the Frost of most high-school anthologies.
Anterooms is a thin book, fattened with more blank pages than is healthy.[1] In these not quite two-dozen new poems (with a handful of translations and a fresh flurry of riddles by the Latin poet Symphosius added as...
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