SOURCE: Leithauser, Brad. “Gaiety Redeemed.” The New York Review of Books 47, no. 11 (29 June 2000): 59-60.

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 precise, painterly evocations of the natural world.”

Sometime in the early Fifties, Richard Wilbur apparently cut an advantageous deal with whatever committee of muses or daemons or egos and ids lies in charge of his poetic inspiration. Freshly thirty at the start of the decade—he was born in 1921—he already had two books behind him, which had drawn the sort of acclaim, including a warm nod from T. S. Eliot, that most young poets only dream of.

Those two attractive books, The Beautiful Changes (1947) and Ceremony (1950), pulsed with a young man's self-aware, athletic delight in technical prowess. He performed in a variety of forms, both traditional and of...