A man and his art …

… Celebration of the World | Commonweal Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

At one point in the 1980s Wilbur served on a committee advising the Harvard English Department about a proposed major in Creative Writing. He was dubious about this idea, as was the only other writer on the committee, John Updike. Wilbur and Updike shared other affinities: religious faith; a talent for drawing and cartooning; and most centrally, a shared conviction that literature, poetry, is “a conscious celebration of the world—both its bounty and the intimation it gives of the world beyond.” This “positive” attitude toward the world and the spirit has not recommended itself to some of Wilbur’s critics. Reviewing the collected poems, Adam Kirsch opined that Wilbur’s temperament and his religious faith ill-equipped him for “certain kinds of moral inquiry.” Whatever those “kinds”—presumably of a darker color—might be, Wilbur (at least to this reader) seems about as well-equipped to deal with them as any poet in twentieth-century verse and beyond.