Abstract :
KEYWORDS: Richard Wilbur, "All That Is," Hans-Georg Gadamer, hermeneutic ontology 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 HansGeorg 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.