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​Interviewer:

It would be easy to talk about your poetry as a link between, say, Frost and younger metrical writers, but a case can be made for your work actually being connected to Ezra Pound’s “Make

it new,” in that your poems are metrically innovative, not using traditional forms much. Do you see yourself as inheriting this from the modernists?

Wilbur:

When you asked me, a moment ago, to place myself in American poetry, I didn’t know what to say, but now you’ve pretty well said it for me. Frost was not only a metrist but a poet who gloriously manhandled meter, making it stress fine shadings of speech and thought. For that and for much else I would like to be his continuator. As you suggest, I cut my teeth on modernism generally, and so it is not surprising that, though using meter, rhyme and other ancient tools, I generally write a kind of poem that develops as “organically” as any free-verse poem could do.

Interviewer:

You  knew  Frost  when  you  were  a  fellow  at  Harvard. What was it like as a young poet to be able to converse with one of the giants of American poetry?

Wilbur:

 Frost, as I’ve told more than one interviewer, was initially disposed to like my wife and me because her grandfather had been the first editor to publish one of his poems and because I knew much of his work by heart. The friendship deepened as, in Ripton or Cambridge or at our house in Portland, Connecticut, we prompted his delightful and tireless talk. He thought well of my poems, and I rejoiced in that. He was less favorable to me as a critic. When I was lecturing on poetry at Harvard he would somehow be informed of anything I said about him and would send word to me that I was wrong. Actually, I was generally right, but I think the truth of it was that Robert did not like to be interpreted, even in the most admiring fashion.

Interviewer:

Can you talk about how you begin a poem, both in terms of subject matter and the form it takes?

Wilbur:

Many people nowadays are embarrassed by the word “inspiration.” Yet that’s what happens: poems come to you; you don’t go after them. Prior to the writing of a poem I have a feeling of vague potentiality. Then a striking word or phrase may occur to me and begin the process of activating that cloudy material and turning it into speech. As the words come, they somehow know from the beginning what forms will serve their mood and logic—how long the poem will be, what line length is called for, whether rhyme and stanza are needed to enforce the tone and structure. The writing may take years, and I cross out a great deal; but however hard I work, the process is experienced as passive. The words find their form.

​Interviewer:

What about a poem like “In a Churchyard,” which alludes to Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”? Had you planned a little more of the form to start?

Wilbur:

“In a Churchyard” derived, as I remember, from my on-and-off meditations on the status of absent things in Mallarmé or unheard music in Keats or the unseen gem and flower of Gray. As my thoughts on that subject began to be marshalled and spoken, I may have been formally influenced by Gray’s pentameter quatrains. Similarly, when meditations on my herb garden led me to think of the miniature landscapes of Japanese gardening, I found myself (in “Thyme Flowering among Rocks”) adopting the haiku form—or rather adapting it, since I furnished it with rhymes and used it as a stanza in a longish argument.

Interviewer:

Your poem “A Wood” is one that I admire because it addresses this issue of form we’ve just been talking about, and also one of the themes of your poems that I’ve come to love the most—

spirituality. Can you say a few words about spirituality in your poems? I’m thinking of course of poems like this one and “Love Calls Us to the Things of this World,” but also a poem like “Rillion, Rillettes,” which seems like very funny light verse until the last line, “or the doctrine of the Trinity,” which is the heaviest of ideas.

Wilbur:

 I’m an Episcopalian born and bred, though not awfully doctrinaire. In the world about me I see order and energy, and I delight in those things for themselves and also in their provenance. I’m glad that you like “A Wood,” which like many of my so-called nature poems is also about people. This one is a way of saying that the old lady with the rosary is probably as pleasing to God as are the stormy thinkers and theologians. My light-verse joke about the Trinity could seem disrespectful, I suppose; but it is a hard concept, as you say, and that’s all I meant.

Interviewer:

Did growing up in the Episcopal Church have any poetic influence on you? You’ve written a hymn yourself.

Wilbur:

The Episcopal Church has the best liturgy in Christendom, even after those recent revisions which caused Auden to say that the church was throwing away its treasure. The words of Episcopal-Anglican liturgy are long pondered, plain and beautifully phrased, and they early gave me a sense of how a moved and heightened English should sound. The Episcopal hymnal is full of rousing things, and I am pleased that the text I wrote in 1959 is now hymn number 104.

Originally the text was written at the request of my friend Richard Winslow, who set it for performance at a Wesleyan Christmas concert. What I learned, in writing the words of a hymn, was that such a composition  (as  opposed  to  a  poem)  must  not  be  an  expression  of  one’s own beliefs, doubts and peculiarities; it must be a completely orthodox statement which a whole congregation can heartily agree to make.