On a recent wet Saturday, I drove north – past dairy farms and steaming fairgrounds – to Cummington, Mass., and the home of the celebrated American poet Richard Wilbur. Never heard of Cummington? Neither had Mr. Wilbur before he happened through it while an undergraduate at Amherst, accompanied by Charlotte Ward, a student at Smith who later became his wife. They were so taken with the place – wooded countryside with a river running through – that they vowed to return.

Then in the mid-1960s, as Mr. Wilbur explained, “We’d gone down to New Haven to take part in a memorial program for Randall Jarrell, who had just died. And there were all sorts of poets there – John Berryman, John Crowe Ransom, Dick Eberhardt, and many another. They were giving us cocktails after our performance, and I found myself talking to Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark.

“They were speaking with alarm at the way New England seemed to be taken over by second-home people or third-home people. And they were talking about the tendency to dam up a stream, creating a lake, and build a lot of little chalets around it. They gave me a feeling that I ought to get a hold of some piece of New England land and not let the rascals have it. … So we came to Cummington to claim some of it from the real estate rascals.” With his small savings, Mr. Wilbur purchased the land and eventually built a house in the woods on an old burned-out foundation.

Over the years, the poet has become wonderfully “compromised by the place,” as he put it. Old stone walls, now lying in disuse, line the woods behind his writing studio. Of these lichen-decorated remains, Mr. Wilbur wrote, in “A Wall in the Woods: Cummington”:

Except to prompt a fit of elegy
It is for us no more, or if it is,
It is a sort of music for the eye,
A rugged ground bass like the bagpipe’s drone

On which the leaf-light like a chanter plays. Other, more abrupt changes have occurred over the years, as well. “It was in the early 90s,” Mr. Wilbur recalled, “and a big 100-foot pine fell on top of the old silo I had [as a writing studio], and which I loved, and made it necessary to replace it with something more civilized.”

On a table by his writing desk in the new studio lay a recent typescript, and Mr. Wilbur described his current project. “My wife, Charlee, had a couple of rather frightening operations earlier this year. She was in a hospital for a long time and then in a rehab place – six months away from home. And that really broke my stride as a poet: I found that I simply couldn’t write any poems during her illness. So I started doing one of the few Moliere plays that I hadn’t translated. It put me into a pleasant abstracted condition. It’s rather like doing a crossword puzzle and not at all as emotionally taxing as writing poems.

“It’s called ‘Le depit amoureux,’ which I suppose everybody translates as ‘Lovers’ Quarrels,’ the second full-length verse play Moliere ever wrote. It was very successful in its time and subsequently has not been as successful, simply because of the kind of theater it was. It didn’t have any of the psychological depth of Moliere’s later plays; it didn’t hold up the mirror to Moliere’s society. It was simply an Italian-derived series of good vaudeville turns.”

“I think that the right actor could probably make it work on the stage,” he said. “It has a character named Mascarille, who is the clever servant. He’s the standard servant out of commedia dell’arte, and the play has a lot of other characters thus derived, all of rather a stock nature. It is their situations and their contretemps that are diverting.”

Mr. Wilbur’s elegantly rhymed and metered versions of Moliere are among the miracles of the translator’s art, alongside C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s Proust and Hobbes’s Thucydides. How, then, has Wilbur’s work for the theater contributed to his own signal achievement as a poet – which is being monumentalized in December in a new “Collected Poems, 1943-2004”?

“I think there’s a kind of precision in translation, if you’re going to be at all responsible, that is transferable to one’s own work,” he told me. “Through the experience of making actors speak, you can also find yourself being somewhat broadened by the thing you’re working on. If the various characters … require some kind of emotive language that is not familiar to you as a poet, it is probably going to push you in the direction of stretching yourself emotionally in your own poems.”

The earliest glimmerings of Mr. Wilbur’s great dramatic monologue “The Mind-Reader,” in the voice of a drunken and dissolute clairvoyant laid low by the burdens of his trade, came to him while completing his first Moliere translation, “The Misanthrope.”

“I finished that translation in Rome in 1954-5. It was among a number of jobs I was doing, while living at the American Academy. In that year, I met the original of the mind reader of my poem. Many people at the Academy had found it exciting to go down to a little joint called the Pizzeria Sacrestia and have their minds read. And there was a man there who did appear to be able to do it. On one occasion, my wife and I took Charles Singleton, the Dante man, and his wife, to see the mind reader. The very skeptical Charles found himself admitting that, if there was something dishonest about it, it was impossible to see where the trick might lie. And the mind reader said to Charles, either on his first visit or his second (for he did go back again), ‘You know that I can do it, don’t you?’ And Charles grudgingly said, ‘Yes. Yes, I know that you can do it.’ Then the mind reader said to him, ‘Well, it’s no pleasure to have a mind that’s like a common latrine.’ Faugh, a mind that everyone can relieve himself into, a terrible metaphor for his experience.”

“When Charles repeated that to me it had a jolting effect on my imagination. I could not get rid of the thought of what the day-to-day psychology of a working mind reader must be. It took me about 20 years, actually, to write the poem, but it was with me all that time.”

Perhaps something of a corollary can be drawn between the work of Mr. Wilbur’s mind reader, who frequently helps to recover for people lost objects and memories, and that of the poet, whose job it is, Mr. Wilbur believes, to reclaim the world and emotion by naming them.

“I think the great enemy for poetry is the inarticulate, because, if we’re inarticulate, we’re subject to fears and to ignorance and self-ignorance,” he said. “I do think poetry is out to fortify us by naming the world fully, so that, while it will always remain strange, less of it is strange to us. … It’s doing that if it’s any damned good, not only for the poet but also for his readers. I think one thing that happens to a lucky poet is that people will read him and suddenly know what it is that they feel or that they felt at such and such a time.”

The articulation of human experience often leads Mr. Wilbur to difficult subjects such as loss and death, as in a late masterpiece, “This Pleasing Anxious Being.” The poem takes its title from a line in Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” and carries the poet from childhood to intimations of old age and of mortality.

“‘This Pleasing Anxious Being’ is full of the shadow of Azrael [the angel of death],” noted Mr. Wilbur, “and I think the most successful image in that poem is the image of thick snow on the windshield like dirt thrown down upon a coffin. I’ve heard a lot of both sounds, and the two sounds are alike. I guess death is something about which a great deal cannot be said, but it seems to me it’s necessary to say the name of it and to acknowledge its presence and its coming.”

“I don’t think that, if you asked me what I write about, I would generally come out with the word ‘death’ first of all, but, heavens, it has to be there all through one’s work. It’s one of the things that people need to be fortified about. Just saying the name of it fortifies people to some extent. That’s why I think people tiptoe around, saying so-and-so has ‘passed on.’ We don’t like to say the name of death.”

Unlike his mind reader, Mr. Wilbur manages to convey to us truths about our experience, not with histrionics and bitterness, but with a clear-eyed affirmative vision, always articulated in exquisitely turned verse, of the joys and pangs of being alive.

Mr. Yezzi is the director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y. His latest collection of poems is ” The Hidden Model” (Northwestern University Press/Triquarterly Books).

This Pleasing Anxious Being

1

In no time you are back where safety was,
Spying upon the lambent table where
Good family faces drink the candlelight
As in a manger scene by de La Tour.
Father has finished carving at the sideboard
And Mother’s hand has touched a little bell,
So that, beside her chair, Roberta looms
With serving bowls of yams and succotash.
When will they speak, or stir? They wait for you
To recollect that, while it lived, the past
Was a rushed present, fretful and unsure.
The muffled clash of silverware begins,
With ghosts of gesture, with a laugh retrieved,
And the warm, edgy voices you would hear:
Rest for a moment in that resonance.
But see your small feet kicking under the table,
Fiercely impatient to be off and play.

2

The shadow of whoever took the picture
Reaches like Azrael’s across the sand
Toward grown-ups blithe in black and white, encamped
Where surf behind them floods a rocky cove.
They turn with wincing smiles, shielding their eyes
Against the sunlight and the future’s glare,
Which notes their bathing caps, their quaint maillots,
The wicker picnic hamper then in style,
And will convict them of mortality.
Two boys, however, do not plead with time,
Distracted as they are by what? – perhaps
A whacking flash of gull-wings overhead –
While off to one side, with his back to us,
A painter, perched before his easel, seeing
The marbled surges come to various ruin,
Seeks out of all those waves to build a wave
That shall in blue summation break forever.

3

Wild, lashing snow, which thumps against the windshield
Like earth tossed down upon a coffin-lid,
Half clogs the wipers, and our Buick yaws
On the black roads of 1928.
Father is driving; Mother, leaning out,
Tracks with her flashlight beam the pavement’s edge,
And we must weather hours more of storm
To be in Baltimore for Christmastime.
Of the two children in the back seat, safe
Beneath a lap-robe, soothed by jingling chains
And by their parents’ pluck and gaiety,
One is asleep. The other’s half-closed eyes
Make out at times the dark hood of the car
Ploughing the eddied flakes, and might foresee
The steady chugging of a landing craft
Through morning mist to the bombarded shore,
Or a deft prow that dances through the rocks
In the white water of the Allagash,
Or, in good time, the bedstead at whose foot
The world will swim and flicker and be gone.

from ‘Mayflies: New Poems and Translations’ (2000)