Obscurely Called: Richard Wilbur at Eighty

With its deft rhymes and dazzlingrnturns of phrase, "Praise in Summer"rnseems at first glance a confection ofrnwords as airy and elusive as the poems ofrnWallace Stevens, who had a substantialrn(and perhaps unfortunate) influence onrnWilbur's youthful work. Readers ofrnWilbur's early books tended to regardrnhim, in the words . . .