At seventy-nine Richard Wilbur has survived most of the poets in the generation before him and some in the generation after. The new poems in Mayflies[1] often seem like things written forty years ago and put in long-term storage, but they could never be mistaken for the baroque, over-mannered manner of his early work. Wilbur was once master of the filigree, the apparently extraneous and precious detail, the verbal undercarving that can look like magic in a period of carving and as fussy and dust-catching as Grinling Gibbons for a long while thereafter.

That moment of high formal style after the Second World War, of early Lowell, Wilbur, and Merrill, might be due for a revival when meter again becomes a language taught to the young, not got second-hand by the middle-aged. The promises of New Formalism look threadbare twenty years after the school opened its doors, but most of its poets had to acquire formal knowledge the hard way, long after their ears had been hardened by free verse.

The danger of a style more courtly than a courtier, civil with obedience, is that the poet may forget why he was writing in the first place—style becomes his raison d’être. Writers who survive the elegance of their style (Shakespeare, for example) are usually making a point: when style declines into a silver age, poets compete with each other in simile contests. Their constraints become conventions. The best of Wilbur’s early poems had an edge