RIP Richard Wilbur (1921-2017)

Poetry News

RIP Richard Wilbur (1921-2017)

By Harriet Staff

Poetry Foundation      

October 16th, 2017       

     

       

Over the span of a 60-plus year career, Richard Wilbur racked up two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, our own Ruth Lilly Prize, and was named poet laureate of the United States, the nation's second. Wilbur died over the weekend at the age of 96. The New York Times offers an overview of his life and career, noting the fluctuations in the reception of Wilbur's poetry and yet emphasizing his skill and mastery of the art. From NYT:

Across more than 60 years as an acclaimed American poet, Mr. Wilbur followed a muse who prized traditional virtuosity over self-dramatization; as a consequence he often found himself out of favor with the literary authorities who preferred the heat of artists like Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg.

He received his first Pulitzer in 1957, and a National Book Award as well, for “Things of This World.” The collection included “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra,” which the poet and critic Randall Jarrell called “one of the most marvelously beautiful, one of the most nearly perfect poems any American has written.”

[...]

By the early 1960s, however, critical opinion generally conformed to Mr. Jarrell’s oft-quoted assessment that Mr. Wilbur “never goes too far, but he never goes far enough.”

Typical of complaints in this vein was a review by Herbert Leibowitz of Mr. Wilbur’s collection “The Mind-Reader” in The New York Times of June 13, 1976: “While we acknowledge his erudition and urbanity, we regretfully liken his mildness to the amiable normality of the bourgeois citizen.”

But there were many on the other side who objected to the notion that Mr. Wilbur’s poems were somehow unimportant because they were pretty. Jack Butler, for example, a resident of Okolona, Ark., wrote a letter to the editor in response to Mr. Leibowitz’s review, remarking, “Sirs, the man has had a feast set before him, the very best, and complains because it is not a peanut butter and ketchup sandwich.”

Mr. Wilbur sailed on regardless of which way the wind blew. He won a second Pulitzer in 1988, for “New and Collected Poems”; became the second poet laureate of the United States, succeeding Robert Penn Warren, in 1987-88; and won many other awards over the years, including the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2006, when he was 85. In all, he produced nine volumes of poems and several children’s books, which he himself illustrated.

Wilbur contributed over two dozen poems to the pages of Poetry magazine, including three translations and a handful of reviews. His first appearance was in the February 1948 issue with seven poems. Wilbur  contributed consistently over the decades, with his final appearance occuring in the July/August 2007 issue with the poem "Ejaculation, Reply, and Song." Head here to read Wilbur's work and celebrate his life.

Originally Published: October 16th, 2017