Richard Wilbur's Religious Poetry

We haven’t been posting lately because sinister forces, scandalized by The Crytogram of Caravaggio, have silenced us. But we have escaped their deadly grasp…for now.

In other news...the other day I was flipping through the Library of America’s American Religious Poems, an anthology whose title is a bit misleading, since many of the poems are actually anti-religious...sort of like including Hitchens in a collection of great religious thinkers. But there are good poems in it, including several by Richard Wilbur. Here’s “The Proof”:

Shall I love God for causing me to be?
I was mere utterance; shall these words love me?

Yet when I caused his work to jar and stammer,
And one free subject loosened all his grammar,

I love him that he did not in a rage
Once and forever rule me off the page,

But, thinking I might come to please him yet,
Crossed out delete and wrote his patient stet.

In the fantastic collection of interviews Fourteen on Form, Dr. Baer talks to Wilbur about the role of religion in his poetry. Baer notes that much of Wilbur’s work--including “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” (one of my all-time favorites—Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry!), “A Christmas Hymn,” “Matthew VIII, 28ff.,” “Peter,” “A Wedding Toast”--has “the sense of a part of the world that goes beyond just the material.” Wilbur responds:

Probably I can, in a loose way, be classified as a religious poet. It’s harder nowadays to write poetry that lies comfortably and coherently within the boundaries of some particular faith, than it used to be. There is nothing limited about George Herbert’s poetry, but it is poetry which cheerfully accepts the whole vocabulary and vision of Anglicanism. I’m an Anglican, I guess, but because I’m three centuries after George Herbert, I don’t write in an Anglican vocabulary, or always with a governed vision that specifically belongs to any one faith. (13-14).

That remark says so much about how religion has faded in the public sphere and the creative mind. His reference to “the vocabulary” of a religion is particularly interesting to me, because it suggests that we just don’t know how to talk or write about what we believe, that we’ve lost a shared way of communicating about these things. That said, Wilbur manages pretty well for somebody without a “whole vocabulary.”