Things of This World
by Richard Wilbur
Summary
Things of This World, Richard Wilbur's 1956 collection, marked his breakthrough after a decade spent building a reputation, since his 1947 debut The Beautiful Changes, as a formalist heir to Robert Frost's tradition, someone unwilling to abandon traditional meter and rhyme even as much of American poetry moved toward looser, freer forms. The title poem, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, opens on laundry lines seen from a waking speaker's window, ordinary sheets and blouses moving in the wind, and turns that unremarkable domestic image into a genuine meditation on the pull between spiritual transcendence and the physical world's own, equally real claims on attention.
A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra extends the same method to an actual Roman fountain, using its layered, ornamental structure as an occasion for thinking about art, artifice and natural process together, the kind of architectural or natural detail Wilbur consistently treats as containing genuine philosophical weight rather than serving as mere decorative backdrop. Across the collection, Wilbur's subjects range from domestic scenes to architectural details to purely natural phenomena, but his method stays constant: formal control, wit and what critics have called a gentlemanly elegance applied to material that other poets of his generation might have handled with rawer, less polished technique.
Reading Things of This World means encountering American formalism at a genuine high point, poetry that finds real spiritual and philosophical stakes inside concrete sensory experience without ever loosening its grip on traditional verse structure. It suits a reader who wants the philosophical ambition of poets like Frost or Auden delivered through Wilbur's own more consistently poised, less overtly anguished sensibility.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Richard Wilbur the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Things of This World, which also won the National Book Award that same year, a dual recognition that established Wilbur as a major voice at a moment when confessional and experimental poetry were beginning to draw much of the era's critical attention elsewhere. It was the first of two Pulitzers Wilbur would win for poetry, the second coming decades later, in 1989, for New and Collected Poems.
Wilbur built his career largely inside academia, teaching at Wellesley, Wesleyan and Smith over the following decades, and his commitment to traditional form, even as it fell out of critical fashion through the 1960s and 1970s, eventually read less as conservatism than as a consistent, deliberate alternative to the looser confessional mode other poets of his generation, including some fellow Pulitzer winners, were adopting around the same time.