I do enjoy formal poetry when it's well done, and I am attracted to many poems by Frost, Donald Justice, and Richard Wilbur. I've probably written about this before, and maybe even in this blog, but Wilbur's "On Having Misidentified a Wildflower" is a touchstone poem that is short enough that I can remember it, and applicable enough that I return to it often:
A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.
While writing this blog post, I read a bit more about Wilbur, and I can see that what attracts me to him is both the best and worst of what I strive for when I write. This is from Poetry Foundation's page on Wilbur:
Wilbur’s concern with order and his restrained, formal touch opened him to charges of sacrificing real emotion for smoothness. James Dickey, in his book, Babel to Byzantium, wrote that one has “the feeling that the cleverness of phrase and the delicious aptness of Wilbur’s poems sometimes mask an unwillingness or inability to think or feel deeply; that the poems tend to lapse toward highly sophisticated play.” Of Wilbur’s second book, Ceremony and Other Poems (1950), Randall Jarrell famously complained that Wilbur “never goes too far, but he never goes far enough.”
The article goes on to redeem Wilbur's formality and restraint and optimism in the face of darkness, and to speak of the more personal nature of his later work. But it makes me want both to write more formal work and to do so without avoiding deep or difficult subjects. Here's the challenge, then: to succeed in allowing a tangled or wild subject matter to exist in a box without losing either the energy of the emotion or the craftsmanship of the form. Is it possible? Is it worth doing?
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