Richard
Wilbur
By Mrs. Rabideau
THE LIFE OF A
POET
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Richard Wilbur was born in NYC on March 21st, 1921.
He studied at Amherst college.“As a student at Amherst College in
the early 1940s, Wilbur wrote stories, editorials, and poems for his
college newspaper and magazine.”poetryfoundation.org
He then served as a soldier in WWII. When he returned home, he
used poetry to make sense of his world. “One does not use poetry for
its major purposes, as a means to organize oneself and the world,
until one’s world somehow gets out of hand.”
He later attended Harvard University.
HIS LIFE CONTINUED…
His first book of poems was published in 1947 –
The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems
 He has translated numerous French plays as well
as poetry.
 “About Wilbur's poems, one reviewer for The
Washington Post said, ‘Throughout his career
Wilbur has shown… enviable variety. His poems
describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers
and toads, European cities and country pleasures.
All of them are easy to read, while being suffused
with …verbal music…” - www.poets.org
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He tends to write in celebration
of life despite the darkness he
had experienced in war. “I feel
that the universe is full of
glorious energy,…that the
energy tends to take pattern
and shape, and that the
ultimate character of things is
…good. I am perfectly aware
that I say this in the teeth of all
sorts of contrary evidence, and
that I must be basing it partly
on temperament and partly on
faith, but that’s my attitude.”
poetryfoundation.org
He was admired by Robert Frost and
Wallace Stevens. They even became
good friends.
By the late 1950s he won a Pulitzer Prize
for his third book of poetry.
“Since then, Wilbur has received nearly
every award and honor available to an
American poet, including two Pulitzers,
two Bollingen Prizes, a National Book
Award, and the office of the U.S. Poet
Laureate.” http://www.kwls.org/littoral/the_world_is_fundamentally_a_g/
“A poem
comes
looking
for me
rather
than I
hunting
after it.”
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In 2009, he taught a poetry class at
Amherst. This class was focused on his
writing contemporaries such as Sylvia Plath,
Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.
“It’s going to be
difficult for me
to turn myself into a
considering, evaluative
teacher of the works of
people I knew so well, so
personally.”
http://www.kwls.org/littoral/the_world_is_fundamentally_a_g/
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He is currently alive and well at
the ripe age of 93!
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with
linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
THE WRITER
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the
door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
WORKS CITED
www.poets.org
 www.poetryfoundation.org
 http://www.kwls.org/littoral/the_world_is_fund
amentally_a_g/
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