The Mind-Reader (1976). Content and Description

In this poem (an unusually long one for Wilbur), the speaker is an Italian mind reader who performs for pay in a public setting but who feels somewhat cursed, not only by his inability to forget anything but also by the fact that so many different kinds of people besiege him, seeking answers he largely invents. He has little respect for his clients, since so often their concerns and desires seem selfish and petty. He ends by wondering whether there may indeed be a truly omniscient god who knows everything and sees the best in everyone; finally, though, he merely asks his interlocutor (a professor) for another drink.

This work is a dramatic monologue (a poem in which one person directly addresses another, in the process revealing much about his own character and values). The 19th-century English poet Robert Browning made the form famous, and in the present work Wilbur shows real mastery of this kind of writing. The direct address begins with the verb Think in line 1—a verb that seems addressed at first as much to the reader as to anyone else. Indeed, it is not until the very end of the poem that we become aware of the ostensible addressee—the professor who pours the mind reader another drink.

In the meantime, the poem rambles in a relaxed and meditative way. Appropriately enough in a work that seems so casually conversational, Wilbur here dispenses with rhyme or with any strict metrical pattern; the lines are usually 10 syllables long, but sometimes they are a syllable or two longer. Breaks in the lines correspond to breaks in the speaker’s train of thought. As the poem proceeds, we gradually realize that we are listening to the voice of the mind reader named in the title, but we also become aware that we, ourselves, are functioning as mind readers as we enter into the consciousness of this highly thoughtful speaker.

The poet, too, of course, is also a mind reader in this work, since it is the poet who has created the mind that speaks. At times it may be argued that the speaker sounds a bit too much like a poet: The phrasing occasionally seems too literary, too artfully contrived, to sound convincingly like the voice of a small-time Italian con artist (see, for instance, lines 33-43). Browning, in his own best dramatic monologues, always manages to create the voice of a personality that seems persuasively separate from his own.

In contrast, the mind reader in this poem often sounds like a fairly sophisticated poet. But, perhaps that is part of the point; perhaps Wilbur is implying links between his own art (and artifice) and the sham art of the mind reader, who tells people what they want to hear and who sometimes questions the value of his own performances.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Compare and contrast this work with Ezra Pound’s poem “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.” How does each poet try to characterize the specific speaker of each work? Which poet is more successful in doing so? How are the poems affected by the fact that one is ostensibly a letter and the other is ostensibly spoken?

2. Compare and contrast this work with Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son.” In which poem is the speaker more believably characterized? In which poem is the dramatic situation made more immediately clear? How do the poems differ in their final tones and attitudes?

Works Cited and Additional Resources:
Breslin, James E. From Modern to Contemporary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Butts, William, ed. Conversations with Richard Wilbur. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990.

Cummins, Paul F. Richard Wilbur Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1971.
Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. A Reader’s Guide to the Poetry of Richard Wilbur. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.

Harris, Peter. “Forty Years of Richard Wilbur: The Loving Work of an Equilibrist.” Virginia Quarterly R.eview 66 (Summer 1990): 412-425.
Hill, Donald L. Richard Wilbur. New York: Twayne, 1967.
Michelson, Bruce. Wilbur’s Poetry: Music in a Scattering Time. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.