Neither poet philosophically defends this confidence in particular, neither makes any effort to satisfy Cartesian or Humean representationalism.
Poems achieve confidence that their final perceptions are veridical. Misperception of the world as likely, perhaps even inevitable, the personae in both “A Boundless Moment” and Wilbur’s “April 5, 1974.” These readings introduceĪnd complicate the problem of perception. In the first section of the essay, I juxtapose close readings of Robert Frost’s In order to work out the implications of Wilbur’s poem, I place it in threeĬontexts. The problem is essentially this: in light of “the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination … how can perception be what we ordinarily understand it to be, an openness to and awareness of the world?” 5 (Alston similarly asks, “Why suppose that sense perception is, by and large, an accurate source of information about the physical environment?” 6) Modern explanations of this problem largely follow Descartes and Hume, for whom “the immediate objects of perception are non-physical private entities of some sort, such as ideas or sense data,” representations in the mind rather than mind-independent realities (I will call this view “representationalism”). 2 To approach Wilbur’s point, we may reasonably begin with William Alston’s characterization of (sense) perception 3 as a variety of doxastic (or, belief-forming) practice which moves “from sense experience (together, sometimes, with relevant background beliefs) to belief about things, events, and states of affairs in the immediate physical and social environment.” 4 But in this poem Wilbur playfully confronts readers with what has traditionally been called the problem of perception. It might seem curious that Wilbur attaches this notion to a narrative of sensory (mis)perception, but Wilbur displays a persistent interest in understanding how we human beings relate to the world, including questions concerning the deliverances of the senses. The poem recognizes value in challenging such inflexibility. Most readers will have experienced similar phenomena and found them mildly interesting, but why memorialize them in a poem? The core of the poem, I suggest, is the phrase which I have used as a title Wilbur takes the experience of momentary disorientation as (potentially) a benefit in which “a set mind” is “blessed by doubt.” 1 “Set” here has the meaning we give it when we describe a person as “set in her ways”: it connotes problematic inflexibility in a person’s opinions, perhaps including an unwillingness to change.
It takes the speaker a second look before he understands the distortion and continues his walk.
The poem narrates a walk through pastureland in early spring: the speaker’s vision is distorted by mist rising as the frozen ground thaws. Richard Wilbur’s “April 5, 1974” at first seems unduly interested in a commonplace event. Considered together, they make the case that occasional misperception is not a defeater for ordinary human confidence that our senses are reliable they indicate, furthermore, that sometimes the capacity for misperception may be beneficial. The four texts have in common the attention they give to the human misperception of phenomena. This essay interprets poems by Robert Frost and Richard Wilbur alongside illustrative anecdotes from philosophical works by Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
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