God’s Patient Stet
Writing in The American Scholar in 1991, critic Bruce Bawer claimed that Richard Wilbur is “the outstanding contemporary instance of the type of poet who writes in strict forms about traditional themes, and whose poems—making, as they do, frequent, appropriate, and instructive use of meter, rhyme, imagery, alliteration, assonance, and even the occasional classical allusion—could serve as models in a textbook of prosody.” But the attentive (and therefore delighted) reader will take less note of Wilbur’s model practice than of the sense of marveling that saturates his work. As David Lyle Jeffrey observes in his article, “God’s Patient Stet,” the sense of consistency one perceives in Wilbur’s work “emerges not only from his craftsmanship as a poet but from his constancy as an affectionate observer of creation, both Nature and human nature.” Jeffrey’s article focuses on the poems in Wilbur’s 2010 anthology Anterooms, especially those that are more explicitly Biblical or theological in their allusions. David Lyle Jeffrey is Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities at Baylor University.
This article was originally published in First Things, July/August 2011. Read by Ken Myers. 25 minutes.