With wit, charm, and restraint, Richard Wilbur (1921-2017) is one of the most highly-decorated and widely-read American poets of the 20th century. Known for his amusing verse that conceals heavier topics, Wilbur was a defining voice in American poetry throughout his storied career. His legacy is rife with accomplishments, including the position of Poet Laureate of the United States, multiple Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. Richard Wilbur's death at the age of 96 was the end of decades of fruitful poetry-writing that went against the grain of what was popular at the time.
Richard Wilbur Biography
Richard Wilbur was born March 1, 1921 in New York City. Soon after, his family relocated to North Caldwell, New Jersey. In the rural town where he grew up, Richard was involved in writing his school’s newspaper. His father, Lawrence, was a portrait painter, and his mother, Helen, was from a family of journalists.
Following in the footsteps of his maternal family, upon his high school graduation, Wilbur attended Amherst College where he continued to work on the school newspaper. He graduated with his undergraduate degree in literature and subsequently joined the army. Wilbur meant to serve as a cryptographer, but he was instead enrolled as an infantryman.
Wilbur served in World War II in various parts of France and Germany; by the end of the war, he was a staff sergeant. His time serving in World War II would drastically change his worldview and push him to his career as a poet.
A Portrait of Richard Wilbur, wikimedia
Following the end of World War II, Wilbur returned to the United States and enrolled to study for his M.A. in Literature at Harvard University. While at Harvard, Wilbur befriended fellow American poet Robert Frost, who would serve as an important influence on Wilbur’s career. Following his Harvard graduation, Wilbur began to teach English at Wellesley College. Shortly after the war, he published his first poetry collection: The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947).
After a few years of teaching at Wellesly, Wilbur began to teach at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He would spend the majority of his professorial career at Wesleyan, where he was a driving force behind the University’s poetry publication.
Wilbur continued to publish poetry collections as well as literary translations; his best-known and most highly-regarded is his translation of Tartuffe, the play originally in French by Moliere in 1664 and translated into English by Wilbur in 1963. He also wrote lyrics with Broadway music superstar Leonard Bernstein, and he published his own children’s books.
Despite publishing many poetry collections throughout his lifetime and winning accolades and poetry statuses such as the Poet Laureate, Wilbur was often not highly-regarded by his peers. His formalistic, witty poetry was often compared negatively to the prevailing poems of the time in the trend of confessional poetry. Wilbur was not deterred and continued to publish poetry in his style into his 80s.
Confessional poetry was a poetic movement of the 20th-century with poets such as Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell that emphasized poetry using colloquial language and drawing from personal experiences, often related to psychological breakdowns or mental illness.
Richard Wilbur's death
In 2017, at the age of 96, Richard Wilbur passed away. He was survived by his children, one daughter and three sons, whom he had with his wife, Mary Charlotte Hayes Ward. They met in college while Wilbur studied at Amherst, and they were married after graduation. His wife passed away in 2007.
Richard Wilbur’s Accomplishments
Throughout his lifetime, Wilbur received numerous awards and accolades for his poetic accomplishments. Following the publication of his first two poetry collections, Wilbur was awarded his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952. In 1956, Wilbur published Things of This World: Poems, which won both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award in 1957. He would go on to receive a second Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1989 for his collection New and Collected Poems (1988).
His work in musical theatre and lyric writing for the operetta Candide (1956) won him Best Musical from the Outer Critics Circle and New York Drama Critics in 1974. Wilbur served as the second United States Poet Laureate from 1987 to 1988. His translation work also garnered Wilbur many accolades, including the 1983 Drama Desk Special Award and the 1994 PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation.
Richard Wilbur’s Writing Style
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Wilbur’s poems were formalistic. He utilized a set meter and rhyme scheme to formulate his poetry. His phrases mimic musical phrases, and his poems are notable for both their auditory and visual impact. When reading a Wilbur poem out loud, his use of meter, rhyme, and phrasing lends it the musical quality for which he is praised. Similarly, Wilbur’s precise use of language conveys sharp images to the reader.
Wilbur is often characterized as the predecessor to the New Formalist poetry movement in America of the latter half of the 20th and early 21st centuries.
The New Formalist, or Neo-formalism movement in American poetry was a return to metrical, rhymed poetry by American poets as an attempt to solidify that American poetry is worthy of praise and study as novels were.
New Formalist poetry is characterized by the use of strict rhyme schemes, formal meter, and narrative poetic subjects. It was also seen as a reaction to the free-verse Modernist and Confessional movements in the poetry of the 20th-century.
Modernist and Confessional poetry was often intensely personal in nature and written in a free-verse form, by contrast Neo-formalist poetry was strictly rhymed and metered and concerned itself with subjects about the broader nature of humanity and life.
In addition to using meter and rhyme scheme, Wilbur’s poetry is characterized by his witticisms. He often employed careful wordplay and executed puns and paradoxes throughout his poems. His poetry was concerned with the real experiences and images of everyday life. Take, for example, this excerpted stanza from his poem "Advice to a Prophet" (1961):
Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.” (33-36)
These lines exemplify Richard Wilbur’s poetry: they are metered with a set rhyme scheme of ABBA and utilize his gift for powerful descriptive imagery. Despite the horrors he witnessed in the war, Wilbur, and his poetry, remained stubbornly optimistic. He believed in the innate goodness of creatures and articulated these beliefs through his poetry.
Poems by Richard Wilbur
Wilbur began his first foray into poetry as a child, where he was published at just eight years old in the magazine John Martin’s Book in 1929, the poem was entitled "Puppies" (1929). His first professionally published poetry collection as an adult was The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems in 1947. Many of the poems of this collection sprung out as a result of Wilbur’s experiences as an infantryman in World War II. In 1950, he published his second collection Ceremony and Other Poems.
Wilbur’s third collection became one of his most awarded. Published in 1956, Things of This World is a quintessentially-Wilbur collection of his witty, tense poetry. Wilbur followed it up with three more poetry collections published between 1961 and 1976 until his 1988 collection New and Other Poems which would go on to receive Wilbur’s second Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. As he grew older, Wilbur continued to publish poetry, and his last collection, Anterooms, was published in 2010.
Check out Wilbur's "A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra" (2004). What characteristic rhyme scheme and meter does Wilbur employ? What does this poem say about his outlook on life?
Books by Richard Wilbur
In addition to his poetry, Wilbur published two books of original prose. Both are collections of multiple pieces of his prose writing spanning many years. The first was Responses: Prose Pieces 1953-1976 (1976) and the second The Catbird’s Song: Prose Pieces 1963-1995 (1997).
Wilbur’s prose is unique in that it is composed of lectures, interviews, letters, and reviews written by Wilbur that he collected and edited to be published. His prose was often characterized as literary criticism, in that he analyzes, interprets, and comments on other poets and poems as well as his own.
In addition to these works of prose, Wilbur also wrote children’s books. His use of rhyme scheme and form lent itself greatly to writing silly, witty books for kids, including Loudmouse (1963), Runaway Opposites (1995), and Opposites, more opposites, and a few differences (2000).
Translations by Richard Wilbur
In addition to his original prose and poetry, Wilbur also translated many famous works of French literature into English. His translation of the theatrical comedy Tartuffe (1664) by Moliére remains the most widely-accepted English-language version of the play. Moliére was a frequent muse of Wilbur’s translations, as he translated many of Moliére’s plays into English. In addition to Moliére, Wilbur translated plays such as Phaedra (1677) by Jean Racine and Le Cid (1636) by Pierre Corneille into English. He also translated some of Voltaire’s writings.
A Painted portrait of Moliére, wikimedia
Richard Wilbur Quotes
One does not use poetry for its major purposes, as a means to organize oneself and the world, until one’s world somehow gets out of hand.” 1
This quote comes from Wilbur after his experiences in World War II. It elucidates his motivations when he began writing poetry after this experience, as much of his early poetry was directly concerned with order and shape. Wilbur’s poetry was his way of organizing the world around him that had, as a result of his experiences in the War, been turned inside out.
A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.”
This is Wilbur’s poem in full. It clearly shows his use of rhyme scheme and meter. He employs a rhyme scheme of AABB and a formalistic meter emphasizing the second syllable. Additionally, it showcases Wilbur’s wit and playfulness in his poetry in this poem poking fun at himself for his misidentification, and his broader conclusion about the self-sufficiency and independence of nature.
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A field of wildflowers ready to be identified, pixabay
Richard Wilbur - Key Takeaways
- Richard Wilbur (1921-2017) was an American poet, author, and translator.
- Wilbur grew up in New Jersey and was involved in journalistic pursuits in high school and college; he served in World War II and would later note that his time in the war and the atrocities he witnessed had a profound effect on his poetry.
- Wilbur's poetic style was a return to formal structure; he utilized rhyme schemes, strict meter, and his musical phrasing to craft witty, insightful poems.
- In addition to his numerous poetry collections, Wilbur also published books of prose and many translations from French into English, most notably, works by French playwright Moliere.
- Wilbur's poetry is characterized by its formal structure and its playful nature, showcasing Wilbur's expert use of language and imagery.
1. 'Richard Wilbur,' Poetry Foundation, 2017.
2. Richard Wilbur, 'Advice to a Prophet,' 1969.
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