Richard WilburBy Mrs. Rabideau

THE LIFE OF A POET

• Richard Wilbur was born in NYC on March 21st, 1921.• He studied at Amherst college.“As a student at Amherst College in

the early 1940s, Wilbur wrote stories, editorials, and poems for his college newspaper and magazine.”poetryfoundation.org

• He then served as a soldier in WWII. When he returned home, he used poetry to make sense of his world. “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.”

• He later attended Harvard University.

HIS LIFE CONTINUED… His first book of poems was published in 1947 –

The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems He has translated numerous French plays as well

as poetry. “About Wilbur's poems, one reviewer for The

Washington Post said, ‘Throughout his career Wilbur has shown… enviable variety. His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with …verbal music…” - www.poets.org

He tends to write in celebration of life despite the darkness he had experienced in war. “I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy,…that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is …good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith, but that’s my attitude.” poetryfoundation.org

RICHARD WILBUR

He was admired by Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. They even became good friends.By the late 1950s he won a Pulitzer Prize for his third book of poetry.“Since then, Wilbur has received nearly every award and honor available to an American poet, including two Pulitzers, two Bollingen Prizes, a National Book Award, and the office of the U.S. Poet Laureate.” - http://www.kwls.org/littoral/the_world_is_fundamentally_a_g/

“A poem comes looking for me rather than I hunting after it.”

In 2009, he taught a poetry class at Amherst. This class was focused on his writing contemporaries such as Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

“It’s going to be difficult for me to turn myself into a considering, evaluative teacher of the works of people I knew so well, so personally.” http://www.kwls.org/littoral/the_world_is_fundamentally_a_g/

He is currently alive and well at the ripe age of 93!

THE WRITERIn her room at the prow of the houseWhere light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearingFrom her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keysLike a chain hauled over a gunwale. Young as she is, the stuffOf her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:I wish her a lucky passage. But now it is she who pauses,As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,And then she is at it again with a bunched clamorOf strokes, and again is silent. I remember the dazed starlingWhich was trapped in that very room, two years ago;How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creatureBatter against the brilliance, drop like a gloveTo the hard floor, or the desk-top, And wait then, humped and bloody,For the wits to try it again; and how our spiritsRose when, suddenly sure, It lifted off from a chair-back,Beating a smooth course for the right windowAnd clearing the sill of the world. It is always a matter, my darling,Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wishWhat I wished you before, but harder.

WORKS CITED www.poets.org www.poetryfoundation.org http://www.kwls.org/littoral/

the_world_is_fundamentally_a_g/