Customer Reviews

Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976

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After reading Collected Poems(1989); Mayflies (2000) and Catbird's Song (newer essays), this book is a great gap-filler of insight into the mind and marrow of America's greatest living poet. The best essay is on A.E.Housman, a favorite poem titled Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries: 'These, in the day when heaven was falling,/The hour when earth's foundations fled,/Followed their mercenary calling,/And took their wages and are dead./Their shoulders held the sky suspended;/They stood, and earth's foundations stay;/What God abandoned, these defended,/And saved the sum of things for pay.' Wilbur uses this poem as an example of how much the meaning of a great poem resides in its sound, pacing, diction, literary references('Wages of sin is death': Romans 6:23), its convention - the deliberate movement that releases the full and powerful sonority the author intended. This essay alone is worth twice the price of the book. Every serious poet or poem lover needs this by the easy chair.