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Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on May 14, 2007
Literary Imagination 2007 9(2):125-142; doi:10.1093/litimag/imm008
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Richard Wilbur: Xenia

Bonnie Costello*

*Bonnie Costello, Boston University, Boston, USA.

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Rose colored cup and saucer,
Flowery demitasses:
They lie beside the river
Where an armored column passes.
...
The ground everywhere is strewn
With bits of brittle and froth—
Of all things broken and lost
The porcelain troubles me most.
"Song of Porcelain" (Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Robert Pinsky)

Wallace Stevens wrote that "modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are ... the precious portents of our own powers."1 For the generation who experienced the Second World War directly, the challenge was to keep the decreative tied to the creative, and to resist the overwhelming force of destruction. In time of war, modern reality came to seem more a reality of destruction. The dump was no longer a place of privileged revelation, but a ruin, where, as Simone Weil noted, the creative passes not into the decreative but into nothingness.

Richard Wilbur's impulse was not so . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Wilbur's Windows
 

   Objects on a Table
 

   Performing the Still Life
 

   Things Transitive and Intransitive/Broken and Mended
 

   The Hole in the Floor
 

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