Together at Last, Thanks to Caitlin Doyle: Richard Wilbur, Edgar Allan Poe, and Foucault

Caitlin Doyle considers how poet Richard Wilbur merged "his poetic vision with the world beyond the window" in a new essay for an online journal of literary criticism, Literary Matters. "For Wilbur, who maintains ... that his own writing can be understood, in large part, 'as a public quarrel with the aesthetics of Edgar Allan Poe,' Poe’s poetry reveals the hazards inherent in language so overwrought that its surfaces sever the reader from reality." More:

Given Poe’s much-studied impact on French literature, it seems salient to assay some of Michel Foucault’s central ideas in our examination of Wilbur’s poetry. Of particular pertinence to our discussion are those ideas of Foucault’s that relate to Wilbur’s self-proclaimed “public quarrel” with art that fails to root itself sufficiently in the physical world. In The Order of Things, Foucault traces the evolution of literature from the classical period to the modern age. He characterizes the novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes as “the first modern work of literature” because the language in it “breaks off its kinship with things and enters into that lonely sovereignty from which it will reappear, in its separated state, only as literature” (48-49). Whether or not one agrees with Foucault’s reading of Don Quixote in specific and modern literature in general, we can arrive at a greater illumination of Wilbur’s work by considering how, rather than regarding language as a medium uninterested in a “kinship with things,” Wilbur champions  linguistic expression that connects readers to material reality. Bonnie Costello quotes Wilbur as stating that when “words cease to be a means of liaison to the world” and instead “take the place of the world,” the result is “bad art” (146). We can see this belief enacted throughout Wilbur’s poem “L’ Etoile,” in which he animates the movements of a dancer in a Degas painting:

A rushing music, seizing on her dance,
Now lifts it from her, blind into the light;
And blind the dancer, tiptoe on the boards
Reaches a moment toward her dance’s flight… (1-4)

Wilbur tests the boundary between life and art by presenting the painted dancer as a flesh-and-blood woman caught up in a swirl of “rushing music.” As the poem progresses, though, he draws a firm distinction between the dancer’s performance and her experience as a human being... 

Read the full essay at Literary Matters.