Biography EssayRichard Wilbur has always been recognized as a major literary talent and as an important man of letters-poet, critic, translator, editor-even if he has never quite been ranked as one of...
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Richard Wilbur (born 1921) was a distinguished translator and the most accomplished formalist poet of his generation. In 1987 he became poet laureate of the United States.The son of portrait artist La...
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Richard Wilbur was born in New York City, one of two children of Lawrence L. and Helen Purdy Wilbur. His father was an artist, a portrait painter. When Wilbur was two years old, the family moved to a ...
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Richard Wilbur has always been recognized as a major literary talent and as an important man of letters--poet, critic, translator, editor--but he has never quite been ranked as one of the two or three...
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In the following essay, Richard Wilbur, at the time a young poet, discusses his “working principles” in writing and understanding poetry.
Before answering the present questionnaire, I sh...
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In the following essay, the author considers the paradox of affirming life amid suffering and deprivation at the center of poems such as “Beasts,” “Still, Citizen Sparrow,”...
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In the following essay, Farrell responds to the critical argument that Wilbur is insensitive to modern issues that modern poet’s like T. S. Eliot addressed, posing that if Wilbur “seems ...
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In the following essay, the author writes about Wilbur's The Mind-Reader, the writer favorably compares Wilbur to Robert Browning.
The title poem of Richard Wilbur's new book is a dramat...
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In the following essay, the author provides several close readings of poems such as “Juggler,” “The Beautiful Changes,” and “Boy At the Window,” among others,...
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In the following essay, Michelson explicates the poetic themes of Wilbur's collection, The Mind Reader, focusing on how the collection will endure because the individual poems lend themselves s...
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This essay suggests that Wilbur's oeuvre “celebrates the power of metaphorical language to divine the human implications” of natural patterns.
The publication of Richard Wilbur&#x...
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In the following essay, Michelson explores word-play in several of Wilbur's poems, including “The Regatta” and “Year's End”.
While we acknowledge his eruditio...
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In the following essay, Bawer explicates several of Wilbur's poems and attempts to position the poet's work against the context of Allen Ginsberg's anarchic poetry and the anger o...
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This biographical essay explores the influence of several Boston poets on Wilbur's poetry, including John Ciardi, Archibald MacLeish, and Sylvia Plath.
“love Calls Us to the Things of Th...
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The follow essay provides an overview of Wilbur's 1976 work, The Mind-Reader and considers “the strategic failure” of Wilbur's prophetic stance.
Wilbur's 1976 volume...
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In the following essay, the writer argues that Wilbur's poetry, with its emphasis on craftsmanship, represents a “new conservatism” in American poetry.
Richard Wilbur, born in 192...
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In this essay from a book-length project on religious themes in Wilbur, the author contends that Wilbur is a metaphysical poet
Now there is, I conceive, one duality that underlies a great deal of poet...
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In the following essay, the author considers several early poems that Wilbur claims were written “in answer to the inner and outer disorders of the Second World War.”
From 1942 to 1945, ...
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Arguing that Wilbur's career-long preoccupation with locating the relationship between the tangible and intangible leads him to put ekphrasis—the verbal depiction of a visual object ...
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In the follow review of Wilbur's Mayflies, the author reviews Wilbur's career and especially praises Wilbur's eulogistic poems, which “draw much of their beauty from precis...
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The following essay reviews the later work of Richard Wilbur, noting that Wilbur has followed Yvor Winters' dictum, “Write little; do it well.”
“Write little; do it well,&#...
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In this brief essay, the author, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, argues that Wilbur's success as a translator of Molière is due in large part to his skills as a poet.
It was once asserted...
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In the following essay, the writer discusses how Wilbur's A Bestiary modifies and builds on the original medieval text Wilbur translated.
Everything in the world is strange and marvellous to we...
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In the following essay, Wilbur discusses his poem “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Schiarra.”
Since the second World War, the American people have come to accept the poetry reading ...
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In the following essay, the author compares Wilbur's use of nature imagery with that of Henry David Thoreau and Robert Frost.
When Amherst College presented Frost with his twenty-first honorary...
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In the following essay, the author explores the significance of the material object in Wilbur's poetry and juxtaposes Wilbur's work with poets such as William Carlos Williams and Mariann...
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In the following essay, the writer considers Wilbur as a Romantic poet whose work celebrates the possibility of redemption through the sensual experiences of the world around us
“Poetry does no...
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In the following essay, the author reviews Walking to Sleep and finds aspects of Wilbur's poetry “fundamentally dishonest” while acknowledging Wilbur's important contributi...
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In the following excerpt, Cummins suggests that Wilbur's consistent use of traditional verse forms for his poetry owes to the poet's assertion that “the artist cannot hope to tran...
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Critical Essay by John Ciardi
Wilbur's first book, "The Beautiful Changes" (1947), marked him immediately as something special. A trace of indebtedness to Yeats and a clear line o...
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Critical Essay by M. L. Rosenthal
[In] Things of This World Richard Wilbur seems beset by a sort of ennui, the result of a conceptual dependence which bedevils him with an especially treasonous subtle...
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Critical Essay by William Dickey
Richard Wilbur, in [Walking to Sleep] shows again the ability of the shape-changer, the capacity to move from form to form, or even from voice to voice, depending on t...
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Critical Essay by Paul Ramsey
Richard Wilbur does what he does well and gladly, learns new ways and enjoys them too. The charges against him are mostly compliments. Yes, he has mastered the iambic lin...
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Critical Essay by Anne Williams
Richard Wilbur's "Beasts" expresses nostalgia for a lost Eden, not of childhood, but of unconscious animal existence. Evil is man's alone, c...
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Critical Essay by Bruce Michelson
When it came out in 1976, The Mind-Reader didn't change any minds. As Richard Wilbur's latest collection of poems, the book was reviewed about eighteen ...
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Gregory is an American poet, critic, and translator whose works include Rooming House (1930) and Medusa in Gramercy Park (1960). In the following review, he praises the "charm" of Wilbur...
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In the following essay, Wai provides an analysis of Wilbur's poem "A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra."
In his book of word games for children Opposites, Richard Wilbur ...
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In the following essay, Wai provides a brief explication of Wilbur's poem "Ceremony."
In his poem "Ceremony," Richard Wilbur treats the paradox that man and nature m...
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In the following essay, Woodard defends Wilbur's poetry against detractors who find his work "too happy."
Critical commentaries on Wilbur's poetry have come to seem rather ...
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Hecht is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet whose works include A Summoning of Stones (1954) and The Hard Hours (1968). In the following review, he offers an overview of major themes and technique...
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In the following essay, Harris surveys major themes in Wilbur's poetry and explains how his work in New and Collected Poems forms a cohesive whole.
The publication of Richard Wilbur's Ne...
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Kronen is an American poet and critic. In the following interview, Wilbur discusses his influences, his thoughts on being poet laureate, and his opinions of contemporary poetry.
[Steve Kronen:] For th...
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In the following essay, Green analyzes and discusses the images and metaphors in Wilbur's poem "Beasts."
Richard Wilbur's "Beasts" depicts in striking imagery...
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In the following essay, Ramanen explains Wilbur's use of form and contrasting imagery to create a unified poem.
Richard Wilbur's "The Writer" (New and Collected Poems, 1988...
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In the following essay, Frontain cites classical and biblical sources and influences of Wilbur's "Advice to a Prophet."
In "Advice to a Prophet," the title poem in R...
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Hazo is an award-winning American poet and critic. In the following essay, he surveys Wilbur's works and praises him as one of the greatest American poets.
Ever since I first began reading Rich...
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Richard Purdy Wilbur
Richard (Purdy) Wilbur
