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Introduction
In 1976, called on to help celebrate the U.S. Bicentennial, Richard Wilbur faced a dilemma that has only become more problematic in the half-century, almost, since he responded: how to honor patriotism without discounting pluralism. When he wrote "The Fourth of July,"1 he surely knew that he was taking several risks, personal, professional, and public. By the mid-1970s his poetry had won the National Book Award (1957), his first Pulitzer Prize (1957), and the Bollingen Prize (1971); he had received several honorary degrees and had been elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1974–1976).2 He had achieved these and other recognitions by writing masterfully in traditional forms that many of his contemporaries considered outmoded, so his success brought disdain as well as acclaim. His work was described, dismissively, as urbane and witty and gentlemanly. Simply by choosing to write about the Fourth of July he risked encouraging a persistent but reductive assessment of his work as too conventional, too middle-class, and too safe.3 On the other hand, his moderate tone risks the appropriation of his work to a glib patriotism. Some readers may miss what he is saying because he says it modestly, simply commending empathetic listening, across social divisions, within a highly polarized public debate.
The poem also takes another kind of risk. Writing within a cultural context shaped by a strong bias in favor of sequential reasoning, Wilbur produces a loosely episodic poem. He offers meaning by way of the imaginative play of associations. Because he suggests, rather than explaining, and expects readers to meet him halfway (to engage in the work of reflection on their way to understanding how his episodes relate to each other) he risks being misunderstood. But the poem's indirectness seems necessary, partly modeling the account of meaning that it commends.
On one level, Wilbur faces these various risks by writing about risk, the social risk of committed listening within the give-and-take of ideas in civic discourse.4 Wilbur (like Charles Taylor, whose work will inform my reading) commends a robust pluralism. For Wilbur, responsible participation in a free society involves the risk of making one's commitments public, exposing them to criticism and correction. The paradigmatic figure for such risk within...