Richard 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 the two or three best contemporary American poets. Early in his...

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 best contemporary American poets. Early in his...

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 pre-Revolutionary stone house in North Caldwell, New...

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 Lawrence Lazear, Richard Wilbur took the surname of...