Poetry, unlike prose, is writ small, but looms large. It is the job of prose to make large things, such as war and peace, comprehensible to us. Even if Fabrice del Dongo could not grasp the enormous battle he was immersed and submerged in, Stendhal could, and could convey its meaning to us. Edith Sitwell was wrong to praise her more talented fellow poet Roy Campbell as follows: “He believed, as I believe, that it is equally infamous to massacre priests, nuns, Jews, peasants, and aristocrats.” That is a large truth, and does not require the services of poetry to give it stature. But the death of a toad, which seems minuscule, does need a poet to bring it home to us. And this, along with so much else, is what Richard Wilbur has brought into every home by special delivery.

Half centuries, like centuries, do not pay much attention to the calendar. For the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, it was the year 1914 that marked the start of “the real twentieth century.” But if the first half of our century was late in coming, the second, beginning with the end of World War II, was roughly five years early. And when, in that to us so important second half, the dust of proximity settles, it will be seen that the pure champions of poetry were not the maniacal Robert Lowell or the equally mad and even more marginal John Berryman; not the richly loud-mouthed Adrienne Rich