Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976
Harrigan, Anthony
aids that look like the instruments of a medieval torture chamber, yet if the sleuths from the Federal Trade Commission entered a complaint, Mr. Talese and his colleagues would be howling...
...The hand and mind of the poet is in these prose comments on the spiritual impoverishment of our country as a result of "an incoherence aggravated by an intolerable rate of change...
...As the years fall away it is ever more obvious that a vast number of liberals are more serious about their images than about true liberalism...
...Yet he specifically rejects the attitude or role of the alienated writer...
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...He refers to the "atomism of Anthony Harrigan, executive vice president of the United States Industrial Council, edited and contributed to the Ten Poets Anthology, a collection inc/uding early work by Richard V/ilbur...
...Imagine how that lunatic yawp would go over with Vladimir Bukovsky and the starving prisoners of the Gulag...
...He is not, he notes, "a programmatic poet...
...we are not really one culture...
...Like Robert Frost's work, Richard Wilbur's poetry is understandable and straightforward...
...Perhaps the finest expressions of Wilbur's sensibility are in the commencement address "A Speech at a Ceremony...
...Flynt also publishes racist stuff like cartoons of grotesque Negroes crawling after rat traps baited with watermelon...
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...But those who cannot discriminate between the condition of Andrei Sakharov and that of Mr...
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...To quote Mr...
...He writes: "The church in our country is broken into hundreds of sorry and provincial sects...
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...Although Wilbur rejects the notion that one should look to poets for new philosophies or new intellectual structures, his commencement address is rich in philosophical insight...
...He isn't ideological...
...They claim that free citizens are not capable of discriminating between pornography and Ulysses...
...The sixteen essays in this book, written over a period of 25 years, are fully expressive of his sensibility...
...Talese and his colleagues would be howling persecution and demanding that the agency get back to the noble work of expurgating mouthwash ads and Wonder Bread wrappers...
...our cities bristle like quartz clusters with faceless new buildings of aluminum and glass, bare of symbolic ornament because they have nothing to say...
...Larry Flynt are dubious judges of others' dis(continued on page 39) BOOK REVIEW Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976 Richard Wilbur / Harcourt BraceJovanovich / $3.95 Anthony Harrigan Ordinarily, it is a mistake to take the measure of a poet from his occasional prose works...
...He recognizes, however, that "We are not a settled and monolithic nation...
...colleges of Christian foundation hold classes as usual on Good Friday...
...Talese, "Sexuality is not divorced from the politics of government...
...American life...
...In this essay, the reader discovers what Wilbur celebrates--" the learned mind and the articulate spirit...
...Anyone who has enjoyed his books of poems, beginning with The Beautiful Changes And Other Poems, will profit from Wilbur's reflections on poetry and life...
...This doesn't mean that he is a poet without ideas, however...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1977 35...
...Assuming Mr...
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...Their feeling for order tends to dissolve in the essay form...
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...In all the pother not once have I heard any of the vicarious civil libertarians even mention that along with the infantile sex Mr...
...Its suppression is entwined with attempts to regulate human behavior through control of imagery...
...Talese is serious, his problem is a colossal inability to discriminate, and it is ironic that just this inability to discriminate is what many First Amendment zealots charge against the American people...
...Richard Wilbur has a keen sense of what modern Americans are losing...
...For those who want to comprehend Richard Wilbur's view of poetry and life, the most important essays in the book are "A Speech at a Ceremony," "Poetry and Happiness," and "On My Own Work...
...In novel after novel of our times, he writes, "we have been shown this peculiarly modern form of sickness or suffering: the inability to feel, or the inability to feel other than perversely...
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...Talese equates sexual freedom ("sexuality" in his highfalutin idiom) with political freedom...
...Think of it, the freedom to vote, to assemble, to form political parties, and to speak out on political issues, is all of a piece with the freedom to sell marital aids...
...This isn't the case, however, with Richard Wilbur, one of the finest poets of the postWorld War II generation...
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...In Responses, he speaks of the poet's desire to speak to and for a nation that is a community...
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...He condemns, for example--and in his poet's superb phrase - - " t h e blank, intransitive heart of the heroes of Albert Camus...
...Poets often are poor at explaining and analyzing...
Vol. 10 • April 1977 • No. 7
