Dr. Connell on Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur reposed on the 14th of this month at the ripe old age 96. Oddly, I visited New England the following week to convene with fellow alumni of Thomas More College, or as we call ourselves in the wake of our college’s usurpation, Cowan program alumni. We listened as one of the first TMC students to do Wilbur for a junior project read “The Beautiful Changes” in his honor. Dr. Connell continues to teach at the current school on their Rome campus. I seem to remember participating in a delegation to him to continue the study of Wilbur in Rome, but that would have been 2005.

Richard Wilbur wrote in one of his essays that the Commencement Address was one of the most difficult prose genres because the writer had so much to take into account. I would say the same for a tribute to Richard Wilbur himself.

The poetry of Richard Wilbur has been an integral part of the College (Thomas More) curriculum for decades. On the front page of my old marked copy of his New and Collected Poems is my name and “Roma 1997.” Thomas More College is the only institution of higher education in the United States (as far as I know) that undertakes something of a special study of Wilbur’s poetry for all students. Wilbur knew that fact and would always brush it off in his self-effacing manner, but secretly knowing that we were onto something, recognizing the order, precision, wonder–and insight–embodied in his work.

One year, probably about 2002, I thought the students might be tiring of Wilbur so I dropped his poetry from the Rome book list. As soon as the list was posted, I had a delegation of prospective Rome students come to my office wondering why I had done so. I explained my feeble reasons, and they responded emphatically that they wanted to read, study, and know Wilbur’s poetry in Rome and that it had become something of a College tradition to do so. So that was that.

Wilbur’s time in Rome at the American Academy in the early nineteen-fifties had a profound influence on his poetic sensibility. I have long thought that Wilbur embodied the quintessential American character, but that his muse was Roman. Compounded with these two elements–the American and the Roman–is a third of considerable importance. When Richard Wilbur served in the Second World War with his division, the 36th Texans, mainly in France and Italy, early on in his service a Catholic chaplain gave him a missal which he studied throughout the fighting. You can see the significance of this event in manifold ways in virtually all of his poetry.

Many times over the years students would choose a study of the poetry of Richard Wilbur as their Junior Project. I would always encourage those who undertook such a study to write Wilbur a letter at his home in Cummington, Massachusetts. Those who did so always received a reply that was courteous, witty, and urbane, so much a reflection of his character and poetry in general.
Ever since graduate school, I harbored a secret hope that I would have dinner with Wilbur one day. The opportunity for that in this life is no more, so now I must place my honest hope and well-founded expectation in the next.

Paul Connell ’85
Rome
October 17, 2017


The Beautiful Changes

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

Urbanism: Profaned and Reclaimed

Carroll William Westfall in “Traditional Building” September 29th, 2017
Demonstrators at the University of Virginia march to reclaim their campus and city.


https://www.traditionalbuilding.com/opinions/urbanism-at-the-university-of-virginia

The recent tumultuous events surrounding Confederate statues attest to urbanism’s role in political discourse. Robert E. Lee and others from the Civil War have drawn riotous mobs, but why on Friday night before the bloody Charlottesville rally did a mob with torches shouting Nazi slogans and hurling racist slurs march across the central Grounds of the University of Virginia and conclude by circling a statue of Thomas Jefferson?

Not because it was convenient: Lee’s statue is a mile away. Was it protesting the University’s being a citadel of liberalism and privilege? Was it enlisting Jefferson in its cause? Was it hoping to return the University to when women and African Americans were not admitted, slaves worked in constructing it, and slaves ministered to the university and to slave-holding students? Wretched thought!

The mob rejected the University’s intention, which is to educate guardians of justice and liberty. In Jefferson’s day students would come from the elite by birth and from those of “worth and genius” emerging from the universal, graduated system of education he envisaged. In our day the elite by birth must pass muster (legacy status does help; this is Virginia) and women, African Americans, other minority Americans, and even foreigners are admitted!

In his day the physical setting was to provide models for the architectural lecturer teaching leaders who would go forth and build. They saw the buildings and Grounds as physical manifestations of the curriculum’s diversity and unity and the content that it organizes. The Grounds, the curriculum, and the content of what they studied were united in conveying fundamental truths that had stirred people since antiquity and who transformed tradition ever after and into the present through new insight, knowledge, and experience. At the University students would learn to reason and to fund truth to dispel error, a program that was as new to the world as the nation itself was, a nation that followed “The maxim held sacred by all free people: obey the laws” and where the people made those laws.

That inscribed maxim greets people entering the Palmyra County Courthouse in Virginia designed by a friend of Jefferson. This small brick building followed the model of Jefferson’s Capitol in Richmond that itself adapted the model of ancient Greek and Roman temples.

The ancients isolated their temples within precincts where they honored the gods whom they believed were the source of their blessings. We don’t. We place them in the landscape among other buildings where they are accessible to all people and where all the buildings work together to make the place where individuals working together pursue the blessings available to a free people.

That open landscape is carefully nurtured into four parts with each serving a distinct role, something that in his day Jefferson’s University beautifully illustrated. It begins in the wilderness; Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark out to map it (there are two statues of these local boys in Charlottesville), and we now preserve fragments before it all disappears. Carved from wilderness is the rural district providing sustenance. Within its extent are dispersed civil centers with two parts. One is composed of gardens, both public parks and the private gardens where buildings are set and where cultivation grows plants for pleasure and the kitchen. The other is the concentration of buildings and open spaces defined by buildings we identify as urbanism where people pursue justice and happiness. At the University’s urbanism buildings embrace the planted Lawn; elsewhere paving prevails. Here is the center of the public, civil life, the place where we plant statues, and later we question their continued presence.

Urbanism doing good service to the civil life, and the civil life it serves cannot flourish without respecting tradition and introducing the innovations that the course of human events call for. Jefferson’s buildings are prime displays of this axiom. Its broad pallet of conventional parts and compositions and open spaces offer an emotionally fulfilling, beautiful, and rationally comprehensible distillate of the good life, here dedicated to the role that education plays in attaining it. Walls, columns, arches, and pediments compose a domed pantheon library, residence-classroom temples, dorm rooms flanking them, and colonnaded and arcaded walkways. Interlacing them are gardens and trees that culminate in the Lawn, a Common where buildings illustrate and discourse interrogates the collected wisdom and knowledge of the recent and distant past. Here antiquity and the experience of millennia are captured in the new, modern world, a place where students, faculty, and others may encounter, modify, reason, and dispute as they expand the body of knowledge and wisdom that we must command if justice is to make us free.

It is tragic that higher education continually distances itself from teaching and developing this civil, humane culture devoted to justice and the common good. Instead now almost everywhere future architects and those who will hire them are taught that architecture is yet another visual art used to display aesthetic or technical accomplishments displayed in buildings that are beyond the capacity of ordinary people to understand or appreciate. Urbanism fares no better; it is separated from architecture and is presented as the implementation of efficiencies that technology and economics define.

I doubt that few if any in the Friday night torch-bearing mob of would-be Nazis and proud racist were concerned about the deteriorating state of higher education today. But the power of the place that Mr. Jefferson built, the place where his buildings and urbanism still teach powerful lessons to those who are receptive to them, moved students and townspeople to act on behalf of what it stands for. They recognized the mob’s action as a profanation and desecration of that civil, humane culture, and so four nights later, simply by word of mouth and without preparation, they assembled and, carrying candles, they retraced the mob’s steps and filled the Lawn where they purged the mob’s stench and rededicated the University to its original, present, and continuing purpose. Here is the power of good urbanism.