“Urging the Unity of Things”: Richard Wilbur’s Poetic Re-creation

Abstract: For Richard Wilbur, metaphors (and poems more broadly) possess the mysterious capacity to make a thing “most itself” by “urging the unity” of the things it compares. Making metaphor is an act of re-creation whereby Wilbur first sought to redress the alienation he experienced as a soldier during the Second World War, an alienation, or separation, that sunders all the things of this world. Wilbur developed this poetic re-creation in a poetry of “second findings,” where the things of this world are unified in new relationship, and the poet cooperates with the continuing act of divine creation.