Richard Wilbur

At the time of his death on October 14, 2017, ninety-six-year-old Richard Wilbur might well have been what the more conservative elements of the contemporary literary scene would term a national treasure. His third collection of original verse, Things of This World (1956), garnered him his first Pulitzer Prize, as well as the National Book Award, at the age of thirty-six. His New and Collected Poems (1988) earned Wilbur his second Pulitzer and made him for almost two decades the only living poet to have attained America’s highest belletristic award not once, but twice. He succeeded the nation’s first poet laureate, Robert Penn Warren, in 1987. Add to this a Bollingen in 1963 for his translation of Molière’s Tartuffe and a plethora of other achievements in the language arts, and no one could gainsay his stature as a man of letters.

Generally considered as belonging to a generation of poets that includes Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell — all of whom eventually broke from the New Critical tenets espoused by American formalists such as John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate — Wilbur alone shunned the solipsistic maunderings of the Confessional mode. From beginning to end, he preferred to write a poetry of wit, candor, and grace, developing in the process an aesthetic that embraced a delicate equipoise between realms both spiritual and empirical. Indeed, Jarrell (usually thought to be ablest critic of the lot) asserted that Wilbur “never goes too far, but he never goes far enough.” To redress Jarrell’s contention one may well cite the first couplet of Wilbur’s “Epistemology”: