About Richard Wilbur
Richard Wilbur, born March 1, 1921 in New York and died October 14, 2017 in Belmont, Massachusetts, was an American poet. Richard Wilbur was raised and grew up in New Jersey. He completed part of his studies at Amherst College, from which he graduated.During World War II, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. He served as a cryptographer, and was stationed in Africa, France, and Italy. Upon demobilization, he continued his studies and earned a degree from Harvard University, before devoting himself to teaching for approximately thirty years. Since then he done successful translations of Moliere, co-authored an operetta (Candide, 1957) with Lillian Hellman, and written two books of children’s poetry.
Alongside his teaching activities, he began publishing poetry collections in 1947 with The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, which received warm critical acclaim. Taking the English metaphysical poets as his models in his own work, Wilbur has excelled at polished, witty, self-contained lyrics with formal stanzas and controlled metrics. He believes, as with his signature poem “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” in spiritual impulses grounded in ordinary life. Yet the most ordinary things can, in the intense elegance of a civilizing gaze, become extraordinary. In “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra” his language creates the secular, aesthetic miracle of Baroque water; the water itself seems to take on the Baroque style. The exquisite, sensuous, and precise description in the poem is Wilbur’s version of the human potential for grace.
He was named Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987 and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 for Things of This World (Harcourt, 1956) and in 1989 for New and Collected Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988). In the mid-1950s, he began translating several plays by Molière, then Racine and Corneille, into English.
He died on October 14, 2017, at the age of 96.
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Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.
