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 makeweights), Wilbur has made a belated virtue of brevity and simplicity. Some oddity of syntax or the quirky way one word leans against another opens the lines to a world more hesitant, more despairing, full of those anxieties Wilbur poems were once good at fending off.
The poems are at times so simple they could be mistaken for the linsey-woolsey of light verse, but at best they have the severity of memories long abided. In his twilight work, Wilbur has embraced Frost’s narrow, homespun diction, with a consequent gain in the register of emotion.
Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last
