The following review essay examines Wilbur's career as a poet and finds his poetry “too elegant to be good, and too good to be elegant.”

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.

In the following essay, Michelson explores word-play in several of Wilbur's poems, including “The Regatta” and “Year's End”.

The follow essay provides an overview of Wilbur's 1976 work, The Mind-Reader and considers “the strategic failure” of Wilbur's prophetic stance.

In this essay from a book-length project on religious themes in Wilbur, the author contends that Wilbur is a metaphysical poet

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—to new uses, the following essay examines the struggle between image and text in six poems.

This biographical essay explores the influence of several Boston poets on Wilbur's poetry, including John Ciardi, Archibald MacLeish, and Sylvia Plath.

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.”

In the following essay, the author compares Wilbur's use of nature imagery with that of Henry David Thoreau and Robert Frost.

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, to suggest that Wilbur takes a neo-classical approach to children's verse and childhood.

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.

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 techniques in Wilbur's work and praises his New and Collected Poems.

In the following essay, the author writes about Wilbur's The Mind-Reader, the writer favorably compares Wilbur to Robert Browning.

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 to have made peace with the modern world, he has not bargained blindly …”

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 Marianne Moore.

This essay suggests that Wilbur's oeuvre “celebrates the power of metaphorical language to divine the human implications” of natural patterns.

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 of Slyvia Plath.

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 translate his direct apprehension of reality into a meaningful expression without the distance afforded by form.”

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.

In the following essay, Wilbur discusses his poem “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Schiarra.”

In the following essay, the writer discusses how Wilbur's A Bestiary modifies and builds on the original medieval text Wilbur translated.

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,” “Ballade for the Duke of New Orleans,” and “A Voice from Under the Table.”

The following essay reviews the later work of Richard Wilbur, noting that Wilbur has followed Yvor Winters' dictum, “Write little; do it well.”

In the following essay, Woodard defends Wilbur's poetry against detractors who find his work "too happy."

In the following essay, the writer argues that Wilbur's poetry, with its emphasis on craftsmanship, represents a “new conservatism” in American poetry.

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.”

In the following essay, Richard Wilbur, at the time a young poet, discusses his “working principles” in writing and understanding poetry.

In the following essay, the author reviews Walking to Sleep and finds aspects of Wilbur's poetry “fundamentally dishonest” while acknowledging Wilbur's important contribution to American poetry.

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

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 so much to new readings.

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.

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's poetry in Things of This World, but expresses reservations about its ability to retain a place in American literature.

In the following essay, Frontain cites classical and biblical sources and influences of Wilbur's "Advice to a Prophet."

In the following essay, Green analyzes and discusses the images and metaphors in Wilbur's poem "Beasts."

In the following essay, Wai provides an analysis of Wilbur's poem "A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra."

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 times in predictable ways: people who had understood and liked his work before had more nice things to say (William Pritchard, for example, in the Hudson Review), and people who were stuck on the old idea that Wilbur is a safe soul, somebody to be arch about, did their usual dance. Wilbur has spent thirty years sharpening our sense of irony and...

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 line and some other meters; yes, he wears his grace with ease; yes, his poems respond to his control. But these virtues do not set him necessary limits. The counter-evidence is too much present in his work for anyone truly to claim, "Here in a well-lit salon you must of need stay, the crystal polished, the corners cleared." The c...

Wilbur's first book, "The Beautiful Changes" (1947), marked him immediately as something special. A trace of indebtedness to Yeats and a clear line of descent from Marianne Moore were visible as signs that his talent was still emergent, but of the existence of that talent there could be no doubt. The poems, richly worded and strictly formal, nevertheless moved within their strictures with an ease and assurance that marked Wilbur as the possessor of as fine an ear for the smooth-flowing ...

In the following essay, Ramanen explains Wilbur's use of form and contrasting imagery to create a unified poem.

In the following essay, Wai provides a brief explication of Wilbur's poem "Ceremony."

Richard Wilbur's "Beasts" expresses nostalgia for a lost Eden, not of childhood, but of unconscious animal existence. Evil is man's alone, created by recognition of suffering and intensified by human efforts to resolve or lessen it. Thus the animals dwell in "major freedom." Wilbur's survey of the chain of being progresses from beasts to man by way of the halfway creature, the werewolf. (One remembers that in traditional descriptions of the chain, man occupie...

[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 subtlety. Though he is still one of our better poets, the things his poetry says and lives by are so much of the essence of the modern Anglo-American heritage that others have already preëmpted the original and audacious modes of expression he might otherwise use. Compare his "An Event" with Stevens' "Thirteen Ways ...

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 the particular requirements made of him by the development of a given poem. In a period when the identity of the poet is often associated with the singularity of his voice (Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens), Wilbur's ability to mute the insistence of personality may make the level of his accomplishment less immediately evident, because th...