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Achievements and Influences

Richard Wilbur

2002

what a cutie

  • Published his first book at the age of 26 with high recognition

> The Hudson Review claims that “Wilbur’s is the strongest poetic talent I can see in America below the generation now in their fifties.”

  • Claimed best poet of the 1950's
  • Joined the Harvard Fellows 1950
  • Founded Wesleyan University Press Poetry
  • Helped many poets and writers ever since.

Awards:

Wallace Stevens Award, the Frost Medal, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, two Bollingen Prizes, the T.S. Eliot Award, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the Prix de Rome Fellowship and many more honors, fellowships

(Only living poet to win Pulitzer Poetry Award twice).

Richard Wilbur

A poet of disparities and unities

1. Rhyme and Meter (New Critical Style)

  • Involves correspondence of sound (rhyme)
  • Emphasis on certain parts, stressed and unstressed syllables (meter)

Early Life

Richard Wilbur

1968

  • Born in New York in March 1, 1921
  • Grew up in New Jersey
  • One of the few poets who stuck to his own style and mastered it, unlike going for the popular free verse-writing poets.

vogue material

> published his first poem at 8 years old at a local magazine.

> father and grandfather were journalists, Richard Wilbur ran his school's newspaper.

  • Attended Amherst College, then later attended Harvard University
  • Before going to Harvard, Wilbur served as a soldier in WWII
  • There, his love for poetry was rekindled.
  • Best known for his structured poems, which was influenced by Robert Frost, a close friend.

“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.”

  • Has mentored many poets throughout the decades about rhyme and meter.

An example of Rhyme and Meter of Wilbur

(click next slide to enlarge)

Wilbur is not complicated, reserved or dour.

He just decides to not look upon the suffering and drama but simplicity and straightforwardness.

He views life as not an enigma, but something beautiful and pure in splendor

2. Elaborate Wordplay (Puns and Paradoxes)

Wilbur's best poems often present a double structure. There is a surface plot or situation that unfolds in literal terms. Meanwhile underneath that accessible surface level is a subtext, an unstated but implied second meaning, usually done by puns or paradoxes.

PARADOX

PUN

..........................................................

The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.

Now they are rising together in calm swells.

(Love Calls Us to the Things of this World,

New and Collected Poems 45)

A striped blouse in a clearing by Bazille

Is, you may say, a patroness of boughs

Too queenly kind toward nature to be kin.

But ceremony never did conceal,

Save to the silly eye, which all allows,

How much we are the woods we wander in.

(Ceremony, New and Collected Poems 334)

......................

Wilbur describes the scene with words such as "awash" and uses objects like "bed sheets, blouses and smocks" and how they rise together in "calm swells", comparing the people outside of his window to the movement clothes in a washing machine.

Wilbur brilliantly uses his description of the painting

to reference how we view nature, and how we view

it shows a lot about how we view ourselves. It sounds nice but also confusing, but once one understands it makes the poem more meaningful.

3. Formal and Simplistic Language

  • Wilbur is a part of the many war poets who looked to poetry to release the stress and horrors of war-- though he was not like that.
  • His formal and reserved sentences, though beautiful, made it seem he was detached from his poetry.
  • This questioned the critics, and was made controversial by different views they gave.

Randall Jarrell complained that "he never goes far enough," for having avoided the serious issues of the modern world, for being too oblique or emblematic in his approach to contemporary problems.

You think: beyond the town a mile

Or two, this snowfall fills the eyes

Of soldiers dead a little while.

Persons and persons in disguise,

Walking the new air white and fine,

Trade glances quick with shared surprise.

At children's windows, heaped, benign,

As always, winter shines the most,

And frost makes marvelous designs.

The night guard coming from his post,

Ten first-snows back in thought, walks slow

And warms him with a boyish boast:

He was the first to see the snow.

First Snow in Alsace

Richard Wilbur

The snow came down last night like moths

Burned on the moon; it fell till dawn,

Covered the town with simple cloths.

Absolute snow lies rumpled on

What shellbursts scattered and deranged,

Entangled railings, crevassed lawn.

As if it did not know they'd changed,

Snow smoothly clasps the roofs of homes

Fear-gutted, trustless and estranged.

The ration stacks are milky domes;

Across the ammunition pile

The snow has climbed in sparkling combs.

vs.

This poem shows how Wilbur tries to cover his memories of the dead and the uncomfortable thoughts of the war that time by using the beauty of nature/winter.

Some may say that he is trying to use nature to cover up his real images of war in a cowardly way

While others understand that the poem says that nature can be found beautiful no matter how horrible the circumstances.

John Gery says “To read a poem by Wilbur…is to be pulled simultaneously toward anxiety and consolation, toward despair and hope, and ultimately to be deposited somewhere in between”.

Richard Wilbur

Poet Laureate

Mikaela Mari

"All that we do is touched with the ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know."

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