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Richard Wilbur Essay - Wilbur, Richard

Wilbur, Richard
Richard Wilbur 1921Twentieth-century poet, critic, nonfiction and children's literature author, and translator.
The following entry presents information from 1950 through 2001 on the life and career of
Wilbur.
Richard Wilbur, a twentieth-century American poet and translator who writes in traditional poetic
forms, is known for his attention to craft, his subtle wit, and intellectual rigor. Wilbur's poems
concern the ways in which beauty transforms our lives and the need for imagination and
inspiration to be grounded in everyday objects and experiences. In addition to his poetry, for
which he has received two Pulitzer Prizes and many other awards, Wilbur is known for his
definitive translations of Molire and Racine, for his playful poetry for children, and for writing,
along with Lillian Hellmann, the libretto for Leonard Bernstein's musical setting of Voltaire's
Candide. Wilbur has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and as Chancellor of the
Academy of American Poets.
Biographical Information
The son of a portrait painter, Richard Wilbur was born in New York City in 1921, but moved to
rural North Caldwell, New Jersey when he was two years old. Wilbur's maternal grandfather and
great-grandfather were newspaper editors, and Wilbur showed an early interest in journalism.
After graduating from Amherst College in 1942, Wilbur married Mary Charlotte Hayes Ward and
joined the Enlisted Reserve Corps. He was sent to Italy and then Germany with the Thirty-Sixth
Texas Division during the Second World War. After the war, Wilbur went to Harvard for
graduate work in English. He received his master's degree in 1947, the same year he published
his first volume of poetry, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems. Wilbur never completed his
dissertation, a study of dandyism and Edgar Allen Poe, but after publishing a second book of
poetry, Ceremony and Other Poems (1950), he became an assistant professor at Harvard. In
1952, Wilbur received a Guggenheim Fellowship, with which he translated Molire's Le
Misanthrope and began a career as an acclaimed translator. In 1954, he was awarded the Prix de
Rome, which enabled him, his wife, and his four children to live at the American Academy in
Rome. After returning from Rome, Wilbur taught at Wellesley College for three years. His third
book of poems, Things of This World (1956), received the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial
Award, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. During this period, he was
commissioned to write lyrics for Leonard Bernstein's musical version of Voltaire's Candide.
From 1957 through 1977, he taught at Wesleyan University, served as an advisor for the
Wesleyan Poetry Series, and published several children's books, translations, and volumes of
poetry From 1977 through his retirement in 1986, Wilbur was a writer-in-residence at Smith
College. From 1987-1989, he served as Poet Laureate of the United States. In 1989, Wilbur

earned a second Pulitzer Prize for New and Collected Poems. He received the gold medal for
poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1991. He lives in
Cummington, Massachusetts.
Major Works
In On My Own Work, Wilbur writes that what poetry does with ideas is to redeem them from
abstraction and submerge them in sensibility. Throughout his career as a poet, Wilbur, a skilled
craftsman who writes in traditional verse forms, has grappled with maintaining a balance
between the intellectual and the emotional, and between the world of things and the imagination.
Wilbur's first book of verse, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947), contains several
poems that focus on his experience in combat and reflect his attempts to make order out of chaos.
Favorite Wilbur themesdescriptions of nature, as well as metaphysical meditationsare
evident in his first book, as is a sense of ironic detachment. Wilbur's second collection,
Ceremony and Other Poems (1950) considers the possibility of heroism in a chaotic world in
Still, Citizen Sparrow and Beowulf. Ceremony also contains lighter poetry and epigrams.
Wilbur's third volume of poetry, Things of This World (1956), takes William Carlos Williams'
dictum, no ideas but in things, to heart. In poems such as Love Calls Us to the Things of This
World and A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra, Wilbur demonstrates that spirituality
and imagination are grounded in everyday objects. The title poem of Advice to a Prophet, and
Other Poems (1961) envisions a world without familiar objects. Walking to Sleep: New Poems
and Translations (1969) concerns how to walkor livebefore sleep and death. In The MindReader (1976), Wilbur broaches more personal topics. A Wedding Toast alludes to his son
Christopher's wedding; The Writer observes his young daughter, Ellen, struggling to write a
story. New and Collected Poems (1988) recalls Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening in The Ride and pays homage to W. H. Auden, along with memory's lost moments,
in Auden. Another collection, Mayflies, was published in 2000. Wilbur has also written several
volumes of poetry for children and the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein's musical version of
Voltaire's Candide, as well as an extensive body of prose and criticism. He is highly acclaimed
for his translations, especially of Molire and Racine.
Critical Reception
From the publication of his first book, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, critics hailed
Wilbur as an important literary talent, praising his craftsmanship, elegant verses, and wit. Despite
the popularity in the 1960s of poets such as Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsburg, Wilbur continued
to write in traditional poetic structures, leading Thom Gunn to note, the public prefers a wild
and changeable poet to one who has pursued a single end consistently and quietly. The critic
Leslie Fiedler lamented, There is no personal source anywhere, the insistent I, the asserting
of sex, and the flaunting of madness apparently considered in equally bad taste. But Donald
Hall called A Grasshopper, one of the poems from Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems, a
minor masterpiece. And Anthony Hecht wrote: There is nobility in such utterance that is
deeply persuasive, and throughout Wilbur's poetry we are accustomed to finding this rare quality,
usually joined to wit, good humor, grace, modesty, and a kind of physical zest or athletic
dexterity that is, so far as I know, unrivalled. The critic Bruce Michelson finds that Wilbur
goes beyond skillful wordplay and raises uncomfortable questions about the self and the world

and calls Wilbur a serious artist for an anxious century. Richard Wilbur's poetry and
translations have been widely praised. He has received two Pulitzer Prizes, for Things of This
World (1956) and New and Collected Poems (1988), as well as two Bollingen Prizes for
translation. He received the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the National Book Award,
and the Pulitzer Prize. Other honors include the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American
Poetry, the Frost Medal, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, the T. S. Eliot Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Edna St. Vincent Millay
Memorial Award, two Guggenheim fellowships, two PEN translation awards, and the Prix de
Rome fellowship. He was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1987-1988, and he was
elected a chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Acadmiques and made a chancellor of the Academy
of American Poets.