A Rite of Finitude: Richard Wilbur’s Hermeneutic Ontology

Abstract

abstract:Richard Wilbur’s “All That Is” foregrounds the poet’s thematic interest in ontology: the poem is a meditation on what is and human access to it. Borrowing a phrase from Hans-Georg Gadamer, I characterize the poem’s ontology as a “hermeneutic ontology.” For Gadamer and Wilbur both, human finitude and temporality make it inevitable that our grasp of being can only be hermeneutic—can only be, therefore, both linguistic and dynamic. Wilbur figures all this in the poem’s representation of crossword puzzles.