Richard Wilbur. Biography and Creativity

Although Richard Wilbur is widely considered one of the most important American poets of the second half of the 20th century, and although that status has been confirmed through numerous awards, many honorary degrees, frequent laudatory reviews, and even his appointment as poet laureate of the United States, Wilbur has at the same time often been seen as a poet of limited range, forms, subjects, tones, and style. No writer, of course, can be wholly expansive and truly comprehensive, and Wilbur in fact deserves great respect for bucking many of the trends and fads of recent poetry and instead hewing closely to an authentically personal sense of his specific poetic vocation. In the process he has produced some of the most finely crafted and carefully phrased lyric verse of our era.

Richard Purdy Wilbur was born on March 1, 1921, in New York, New York, to Lawrence Lazear Wilbur, a painter who specialized in portraits, and Helen Ruth Purdy Wilbur, whose father was a journalist and editor. In 1923 young Wilbur and his family moved to a stone house, for which they paid a modest rent, which was located on the estate of a wealthy English businessman and expatriate named J. D. Armitage. Armitage had immigrated to America because he felt that businessmen were not properly appreciated in England, and in New Jersey he established a kind of English country manor, with a large house overlooking more than 400 acres of farmland, including “orchards, pastures, nurseries, walled gardens and lanes [as well as a] barn and pen and dairy, massively constructed in stone and roofed with tile” (Wilbur, qtd. in Butts 116). In these idyllic surroundings Wilbur grew up, playing mostly with his brother and imbibing the love of natural beauty that distinguishes much of his verse. Life on the estate also helped to inculcate the kind of Anglophilia that seems to characterize much of Wilbur’s temperament and many of his intellectual attitudes.

After attending a series of local schools—including Essex Falls Public School, Grover Cleveland Junior High School, and Montclair High School— Wilbur arrived at Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1938. While at Amherst he was active on the school paper, both as writer and editor, and he became extremely interested in the study of literature, particularly by the kind of “close reading” that was just then coming into vogue, and his interest was so great that although he had flirted with the ideas of becoming a painter or cartoonist, he increasingly assumed that he would become a professor of literature. During summer breaks from Amherst, Wilbur twice hitched rides on railcars and in automobiles and thus toured large sections of the United States, and he also fell in love with Mary Charlotte Hayes Ward, a student at nearby Smith College, whom he married on June 20, 1942, after graduation from Amherst. By this time, of course, the United States had been plunged into World War II because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the preceding

December. Wilbur trained for service as a cryptographer, but when an investigation revealed that his political sympathies were left-wing, he was rejected as a security risk. Reassigned to regular service and sent to fight in Europe, he nevertheless became a cryptographer with his new unit when the man who had previously held that job lost his mind. While serving in Europe on some of the most important fronts of the war, Wilbur seriously began to write poetry during the long stretches of anxious boredom that characterizes so much of life in combat. Poetry, he has often said, helped him impose a sense of order on the chaos of the circumstances that then surrounded him.

Having survived the war, Wilbur was one of many soldiers who benefited from the GI Bill, which helped returning servicemen attend college with government assistance. Wilbur enrolled in graduate school at Harvard University, where he intended to study English in preparation for a career in college teaching. However, a friend with connections in publishing who happened to read some of the poems Wilbur had been writing quickly pronounced Wilbur a genuine poet and helped him secure a contract for his first book. This collection (which appeared in 1947, the same year Wilbur received his Harvard M.A.) was titled The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems; it was widely reviewed and highly praised. In addition, more good fortune came Wilbur’s way when he was appointed, in 1947, as a junior fellow at Harvard—an appointment that helped him afford to live in France the following year, the same year in which he received the prestigious Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine. As both an academic and a poet, then, his career was off to an extremely auspicious start.

Wilbur’s second book—Ceremony and Other Poems—appeared in 1950, the same year in which he was also awarded the Oscar Blumenthal Prize by Poetry magazine and began a five-year teaching stint at Harvard. By 1952 his reputation was already so significant that he was awarded an honorary M.A. by Amherst, his alma mater, as well as a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, which was designed to give him the time and resources to try his hand at writing verse drama. Although Wilbur never felt that he was successful in crafting a strong verse play of his own, his efforts to educate himself in this task led him to engage in the first of many verse translations of the works of the French playwright Moliere, thus launching another and highly successful phase of his career.

His translation of Moliere’s The Misanthrope was published in 1955 to great acclaim, and his later translations of Moliere and others have led him to be considered one of the most accomplished literary translators of our age. By 1955 he had also been awarded the Prix de Rome Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a prize that gave him an opportunity to live and write in Rome. Other accomplishments of 1955 included publication of A Bestiary, a book of poems and prose pieces about animals, and the coediting and publication of a significant anthology of recent English and American verse.

Also in 1955 Wilbur began a two-year tenure as a professor of English at Wellesley College, followed in 1956 by the publication of his third book of poetry, Things of This World, and in 1957 by his election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In that same year he received both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize as well as the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Prize, and a collection of verse titled Poems 1943-1956 was published in England. In 1957 also, his contributions as lyricist to the Broadway musical Candide (with a score by Leonard Bernstein) were published, and he was appointed professor of English at Wesleyan University, a position he held for 20 years.

Thus, in little more than a decade since the end of World War II, Wilbur had risen to the top rank of creative writers in America, distinguishing himself not only as a writer of verse but as a translator and musical lyricist and even as a notable scholar of Edgar Allan Poe, a literary precursor with whom he engaged in an affectionate and long-running debate. He has often said that as a poet he has tried to define himself in opposition to Poe, attempting to emphasize the concrete and particular, in contrast to Poe’s tendency toward rarefied abstractions. Nevertheless his attitude toward Poe, as indeed toward most other writers (even those whose styles of writing are significantly different from his own), has usually been respectful and genially good-humored.

The 1960s was another decade of success for Wilbur. During 1960-61 he held a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and in the latter year he not only was elected chancellor of the American Academy of Poets but also represented the United States on a goodwill tour of the Soviet Union. In that same year, too, his latest collection of verse was issued—a volume titled Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems. This text, in 1962, won the Melville Cane Award from the Poetry Society of America, and in 1963 Wilbur himself received his second Guggenheim Fellowship.

The year 1963 also saw the publication of a collected edition of his works (The Poems of Richard Wilbur), the appearance of his first book for children (Loudmouse), his sharing of the Bollingen Translation Prize, and his appointment as Olin Professor of English at Wesleyan. Further awards, travels, and honorary degrees followed in the next few years, but the most significant event of this period was undoubtedly the publication, in 1969, of his new collection, Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translation, which was followed in 1970 by the printing of Digging for China: A Poem.

By the end of the 1960s Wilbur was seen as one of the most eminent figures in American poetry, but his verse was also increasingly considered (by some critics, at least) as remote from the turmoil of the times—a kind of mannered, even Mandarin formalism that was often contrasted with the strongly personal, heavily “confessional” verse of Robert Lowell and his many imitators. Certain critics of Wilbur accused his work of being tame, timid, and sometimes even trite; Wilbur’s admirers, on the other hand, valued his continuing commitment to form, sanity, craft, and restraint.

The 1970s brought further distinctions and achievements. In 1971 Wilbur won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award, and the Prix Henri Desfeuilles. His translation of Moliere’s The School for Scandal appeared that same year, and in 1972 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Another book for children (Opposites) was issued in 1973—the same year in which Wilbur also won the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 1974 his book Seed Leaves appeared in a limited edition, his edition of Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was published, and Wilbur was elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

This honor was followed, in 1976, by his election as chancellor of the same organization and by the publication that same year of two major books: The Mind-Reader: New Poems and Response: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976. In 1977 Wilbur began a nearly 10-year stint as writer in residence at Smith College, while 1978 saw the publication of his translation of Moliere’s The Learned Ladies and his selection, once more, as winner of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award. In 1980 he was once again elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1981 Seven Poems and Advice from a Muse was published. During all these years, of course, he continued to receive numerous honorary degrees.

Awards, prizes, degrees, and other distinctions have continued to be showered on Wilbur into the 21st century, but the most important achievements of any writer are the works he creates. For Wilbur, these have included such books as The Whale and Other Uncollected Translations (1982), New and Collected Poems (1988), More Opposites (1991), A Game of Catch (1994), Runaway Opposites (1995), a translation of Baudelaire’s L’invitation au voyage (1997), The Catbird’s Song: Prose Pieces, 1963-1995 (1997), The Disappearing Alphabet (1998), Mayflies: New Poems and Translations (2000), Opposites, More Opposites, and a Few Differences (2000), The Pig in the Spigot (2000), and the monumental Collected Poems, 1943-2004 (2005).

More works, including a translation of Corneille’s The Theatre of Illusion were published in 2007, and even the publications listed here only begin to scratch of the surface of Wilbur’s astonishing productivity; in 2009 the Library of Congress catalog listed 126 separate items (including books, recordings, editions, and translations). In the final decades of his life he has become one of America’s most widely respected and most prolific writers, author of some of the most important poems and translations of his era. His life, in short, has achieved the kind of grace, balance, sanity, good humor, and deeper thoughtfulness expressed in so many of his poems.