Richard Wilbur

Profiled in the NYT. Somebody break out the sherry.

Wilbur had the misfortune to come of age at a time when literary criticism was receding into the academy, and simple, repeatable liturgies involving ''originality'' made the glamorously obscure poem easy to teach, especially to students with no inherited sense of poetic tradition. That era is thankfully at an end. The emergence of a poet like Wilbur as a hero to a new generation of critics is cause for hope...

Audio files and excerpts here too!


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Richard Wilbur

One of my favs profiled at Slate.

There are two Richard Wilburs. One is the author of a half-dozen of the most perfectly made poems of the 20th century, poems whose quiet elegance is unexcelled by even the most illustrious names American poetry can offer: Stevens, Eliot, Moore. The second Wilbur is an emblematic figure—a poet whose steadfast embrace of meter and rhyme has made him seem (depending on who's making the call) like either a reactionary or revolutionary force. This Wilbur has been set beside other poets in order to represent one or another idea about American poetry—usually dull ideas, the kind embraced by people who enjoy poetry readings but rarely read poems.

Shit, and I've only got books by one of them! And more Wilbur from the New Yorker. (Second link from Beatrice)



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