What is it about?
The essay explains Richard Wilbur's reservations concerning scientific naturalism when it overrules the imagination. In the two poems I consider, Wilbur urges the need for a balance between scientific (factual) understanding and imaginative or intuitive grasp.
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Why is it important?
Without being dismissive of natural science, Wilbur resists an enduring tendency in the modern world to dismiss the work of the imagination as an inferior kind of knowing.
Perspectives
Wilbur is right to challenge the dominance of naturalism; he's also right not to try offer the imagination as an unproblematic alternative. His irenic cultivation of a balance which appreciates both fact and fiction seems to me both delightful and useful.
Dr. William Tate
Covenant College
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Avian diptych: Richard Wilbur’s flights of imagination, Christianity & Literature, May 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0148333115599887.
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