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Richard Wilbur
2002
what a cutie
> The Hudson Review claims that “Wilbur’s is the strongest poetic talent I can see in America below the generation now in their fifties.”
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
1968
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.
“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.”
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
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.
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.
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”.