Richard Wilbur is viewed as one of the great poets in American literature, especially during the latter half of the Twentieth Century. We can see throughout his poems, their real meanings. Their purposes are not lost from the ungrammatical constructions that have been a way of life in poetry for some time.
When a poet’s work confuses, it is called “difficult.” Difficult, perhaps, but, more likely, careless, unfinished, or selfish. The truth must dazzle gradually, but it must dazzle. Over the years, creative writing programs seem to have cultivated a chic opacity of strange, obscure, fantastical language, aimed at achieving some sort of hybrid experience with the poem, as if poetry were a mind-altering drug, and the poet its pusher. This is advice given to poets as a guideline to follow with their work.
In Richard Wilbur’s case he is a poet, that considers having a balance among his subjects. His working style is known for the ironic meditative lyric, what the Norton anthology calls, “the single perfect poem.” Instead of being of a rather lengthy narrative poem or extended dramatic sequence. Wilbur’s style uses life-affirming philosophy, by doing this is he refining the compression and clarity of the poetry. The combination of this along with metrical stanzas that rhyme, could, at a first glance, be mistaken for dogged optimism.
In a typically Richard Wilbur’s poem, there will be a thesis and a counter-thesis that are set against each other. The poem is finished with a synthesis of the foregoing arguments, or a poetic resolution. However, there will be times that Wilbur will out of typical writing structure and use a different format. An example of this is Cottage Street, 1953, which has juxtaposed two opposing entities against each other without giving a resolution
or a synthesis.
"The pursuit of happiness," Richard Wilbur observes, is "the pursuit of self-realization, or of a full humane life.” In his opinion, a happy poet is most important type of poet. Claiming that this ability allows them to achieve "a perfect correspondence between self and world." Such a statement speaks of the importance of attaining the right equilibrium between human vision and physical, literary, or spiritual experience.
"Self-realization" and "the world" are the two key terms which need defining. Self-realization is exploring and projecting the self. A poet cannot simply rephrase what is already known, but rather they must articulate their observation. In Richard Wilbur’s works his articulation precise and authentic that they allow new insights unto his own psychology. Permitting readers to new insight into his mind. While in this process of understanding and articulating his attitudes and emotions, symbols, objects, and actions are used to represent these thoughts. Self-realization is in fact an artistic process, the artist being the eloquent spokesman for himself, his reader, the human race, and the cultures of the past and the present
There was a 1983 reading that introduced Richard Wilbur: “Wilbur’s mind has a cleansing sanity and wit that make it possible for him to view the world, despite its burden of suffering and tragedy and evil, as a place of fortuitous joys and blessings and miracles, not the least of which is the gift of life itself.” Wilbur says it best. In “On My Own Work,” he describes his poems as favoring “a spirituality that is not abstracted, not dissociated and world-renouncing…,” having to do with “the proper relation between the tangible world and the intuitions of the spirit.”
There are few of Wilbur’s works that has continually brought hostile response, this would be “Cottage Street 1953”, which contains a single mention of a contemporary poet by the name of Sylvia Plath. Doing a background of the poem, one can get the idea that “Cottage Street” was a form of aggression and envy. After all, Sylvia Plath’s reputation was extremely high, there were books and articles being written on her and her work. Even a decade after her death, Plath had achieved a form of beatification in the American English literature.
“Cottage Street 1953” is based on the poet’s recollection of an afternoon tea he attended with his mother in law, along with a young Sylvia Plath and her mother. The poem’s initial word, “framed”, suggests a setting of aesthetic composure. The poem is arranged in a way that shows the various elements of a tea ceremony into an artistic pattern. This allows the readers to be aware of the relationship and interaction among the characters. Four pairs of overlapped contrasts are set against each other and at the same time harmonize with each other.
Edna Ward, is described as “Framed in her phoenix fire screen” and served tea on a “tray of Canton,” which represents beginning of the tea ceremony. The questions and answers are all part of the ceremonials of the tea ritual. However, beneath the civil formalities we can sense the tension, which suggested by the word “strained.” The “gender chat” can barely hide the fright expressed by Mrs. Plath and mute accusations against life evidenced in her daughter Sylvia.
Then there is the contrast between Edna Ward and Sylvia Plath. Whereas Edna Ward demonstrates as having “grace and courage,” Sylvia Plath is viewed as “pale” and “slumped.” Ironically “love” is the only italicized word in the poem, which characterizes Mrs. Ward’s attitude towards existence. She is called by love to the things and people of this world. Her life of “eight and eighty summers,” therefore, “permits no tears.” In contrast Sylvia Plath is simply “unjust” to the people and world around her.
The most critical conflict, however is the mute dialogue between the suicidal poetess and Wilbur, “the published poet in his happiness.” His “office” is to “exemplify” his faith in life, whereas she is “condemned to live” and “wishes to die.” Helpless, he looks at her, whom he is assigned to “cheer.”
In the poem, Wilbur compares himself to “a stupid life guard,” and Plath to victim that has “immensely drowned” that simply “swept to his shallows by the tide.” The “tide” can be interpreted as the darker side of life of which Wilbur is also conscious. He feels “ashamed” and “impotent” because he is powerless to her or to contradict her accusations.
However, Wilbur can only feel “half ashamed,” for Plath is partly responsible for her own drowning. She has lost her equilibrium and indulges in her negations of life. Stating that her “eyes of pearls,” stare “through water” and express her resentment. The image of “pearls” is ultimately adapted from Lady Lazarus, in which Plath liken her resurrection to a striptease. She accuses those who thrive on her painful performance of greed. The pearls are signs of the grotesque pain of her resurrection.
Wilbur’s debates on art are seldom separated from his preoccupation with life. The qualities desired for arts are the same qualities recommended for a purposeful way of living. To have an adventurous spirit and to keep in contact with reality are as important to an artist as they are to anyone who desires a meaningful existence. For Wilbur, the suicidal Sylvia Plath, who rejects life, at her best can produce only “brilliant negatives.”
There is more within the poem rather than just the issue of Plath’s “unjust” art. A more plausible reason for the sound of Cottage Street may come from looking at its overall shape, for clumsily or not, Wilbur making himself a supporting actor here; laboring line show so little of his characteristics grace, carry him into the background, leaving two women counterpoised in the afternoon light: Sylvia Plath, and an elderly Edna Ward. The poems tell us that this Ms. Ward- Richard’s mother in law- was a woman of stoicism and grace, of culture and sensitivity, who lived eighty-eight years with “Such grace and courage as permit no tears.” Life brings plenty of experience with quiet folk who live with dignity and composure and who are not stupid, not unaware of darkness all around; and their laconic perseverance might be as profound as somebody else’s “brilliant negative” and early exit from life. It takes no strain to grant that eloquent answers to the “negative” could dwell no just among the brilliant positives of somebody else’s poetry, or in fireside advice from poets or other talky folk, but perhaps in living, and in recalling the lives of otherwise people who have chosen to endure.
Cottage Street needs closer scrutiny than this, for though such a reading might seem self- evident, it continues to be willfully or opportunistically resisted. The poem ends, as so many genteel Wilbur poems try to, with a ringing emotive punchline. Plath, he concludes was “condemned to live” for a further ten years after their awkward tea time meeting but eventually allowed- after much “study”- “To state at last her brilliant negative/ In poems free and helpless and unjust.” Free, helpless, and unjust- the opposites, really of what Wilbur would look or aim in a poem. His taste from the beginning was for the shaped, the celebratory, the equable. Looking back on his meeting with Sylvia Plath, he is not simply resavouring some long ago social discomfiture, nor does greatly wish to perform a decent elegiac chore. There is a mechanical feel to those lines about a girl “immensely drowned”- in 1953, did Wilbur really think Plath as doomed, or indeed think much of her at all?
If you read “Cottage Street” as confessional verse, it seems as though Edna Ward represent several related and very personal values. There is the comfort of a family life, also peace in an inexplicable and private sort which Plath never found. Edna Ward isn’t any more articulate or successful with Sylvia Plath than her son in law has been that afternoon: “frightened Mrs. Plath” who has come with her daughter looking for somebody to recommend life; what they have received is tea with milk or lemon, and an hour or so of “genteel chat.” And neither in her life nor in her words does Edna Ward seem to be offered here as a philosophical antidote to Plath’s despair. Rather, these may be two ghosts who abide in the consciousness of one living poet- a large refusal, and a thoughtful, courageous, decorous, stubborn affirmation.
The last stanza contains most of the trouble:
Outliving Sylvia who, condemned to live,
Shall study for a decade, as she must,
To state at last her brilliant negative,
In poems free and helpless and unjust.
The bluntness at the end of “Cottage Street” is surprising, but since few poets writing in this language choose words more carefully than Wilbur, one must assume that “unjust” is what he means. As Hamilton senses, Wilbur’s sympathy for the desperate young woman runs deep, but finally he states his stolid, unbrilliant positive, as he must, his faith in obscure yet fundamental possibilities in life. And literally to save his soul, perhaps, he turns away from a vision which is ontologically: unjust”. Meaning too certain in its hopelessness, as well as unfair. Through the word treads heavily, it seems, as gentle and “just” an observation as anyone who believes, or even tries to, might make about someone who absolutely does not. Reasons, then, for the considerable risks of “Cottage Street”; perhaps Richard Wilbur had to orient himself, privately and in public, under the considerable and troubling shadow which Sylvia Plath has cast over poets for twenty-five years. “Cottage Street” may continue to be hauled up as demonstrating Wilbur’s “side” in some aesthetic or political controversy, or as suggesting some damning lightness in his own address to experience. But neither conclusion seems fair, and the effect of “Cottage Street” has apparently been to derail some people who might otherwise read Richard Wilbur with more sympathy and pleasure.
In my opinion I feel like there is an ideal structure in poets are supposed to write their work. Guideline in which they must follow to win the approval of their fellow peers. However, in the case of Sylvia Plath she did not follow these rules. Rather Sylvia Plath, tended to experiment with psychoanalysis in her poetry. Plath seems to share the pain of the refugees from Germany and at the same time to feel guilty for the brutality that the Nazis inflicted upon their victims. Plath often saw herself as tormentors and victims simultaneously in a community of pain and torture. Wilbur, tended to avoid deeply personal and painful subjects. Which would explain the dislike that Wilbur towards Plath’s work. Everything that she wrote went against his comfort zone. While Plath brought raw emotion into her poems, Wilbur avoided putting too much feeling into what his work.