Richard Wilbur (1921 - Present)

Richard Wilbur (born March 1, 1921, in New York City) is a United States poet. He graduated from Amherst College in 1942, then fought in Europe during World War II. After a teaching stint at Harvard, he moved to Wesleyan University as Professor of English, a position he occupied there for the rest of his career. He has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and in 1987 was the second poet, after Robert Penn Warren to be named U.S. Poet Laureate.

From the start, Wilbur's poetry was characterized by a formal and refined beauty that was often imitated but never equalled. So formidable are his verse-making skills and his native wit that even the longest and most philosophical of his poems (see "The Mind-Reader" or "Walking to Sleep") carry the reader effortlessly along. It is possible for the average educated reader to finish Wilbur's collected poems at a single sitting, and to find the experience very enjoyable indeed. For this reason, Wilbur is sometimes dismissed as a lightweight or a reactionary. However, it seems likely that his poetry will survive long after his trendier contemporaries have been forgotten. Continuing and refining the tradition of Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, Wilbur's poetry finds illumination in everyday experiences and expresses it in beautiful, carefully wrought language.

Lesser-known was Wilbur's foray into lyric writing. He provided many of the finer lyrical touches in Leonard Bernstein's 1956 musical, Candide.

He is also noted as a translator, particularly of 17th century French dramas, whose original verse forms give Wilbur an opportunity to flex his muscles in both translation and verse. His translations of Molière and Jean Racine are well respected and many are still in print.

The poems are by default sorted according to volume, but you can also choose to sort them alphabetically or by page views.

First Line	Comments
A ball will bounce; but less and less. It's not
A thrush, because I'd been wrong,	2 Comments
A woman I have never seen before
At the end a
Blow out the candles of your cake.	1 Comment
Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young	1 Comment
for Rene Magritte	1 Comment
For Alexander there was no Far East,
I read how Quixote in his random ride
I.
In her room at the prow of the house	1 Comment
It is a cramped little state with no foreign policy,
It's not the case, though some might wish it so
Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides	4 Comments
Piecemeal the summer dies;	1 Comment
R.Frost 100th B'day	3 Comments
Rabbi, we Gadarenes
Right down the shocked street with a	1 Comment
Securely sunning in a forest glade,
Seeing the snowman standing all alone	12 Comments
Shall I love God for causing me to be?
Sidling upon the river, the white boat
St. John tells how, at Cana's wedding feast,
That flower unseen, that gem of purest ray,
The eyelids meet. He'll catch a little nap.
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
The good gray guardians of art
The horse beneath me seemed
The tall camels of the spirit
Though the unseen may vanish, though insight
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Where far in forest I am laid,
Your voice, with clear location of June days,