Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Tuesday Tome - Richard Wilbur

A volume of Richard Wilbur poetry is one of the newest additions to my library, Collected Poems 1943-2004. Slowly but surely, I'm navigating my way into the world of poetry and am finally discovering poets and poems I should have heard about decades ago.
The work in these 500 or so pages has been one of the saving graces of poetry in our time...Such a volume will see a reader through quiet evenings and noisy Metro commutes, indeed through one's whole life." - The Washington Post Book World 
You don't have to read very long to discover Wilbur is truly a master poet. He approaches every subject with great care and craftsmanship. The voice and spirit of his poetry conveys a wisdom, humility, and seriousness about life.

I especially enjoy his poems with strict meters and rhyme schemes because Wilbur makes these constraints serve and strengthen his writing. With his adeptness at verse, it wasn't surprising to learn that Wilbur has also written song lyrics such as "Make Our Garden Grow" from Leonard Bernstein's Candide. This is probably one of the subtle reasons I connect so well with his work.

Wilbur really enjoys being a writer, and a sense of this joy comes through to the reader. In an interview with The Atlantic Online (1999), Wilbur made a few comments about his lifelong experience as a poet.
I'm grateful to all of the poets of the past who have delighted me, and who gave me a feeling that I wanted to do something like that. And if there is a muse, I'm grateful to the muse for the occasional experience of making something as good as I wanted it to be.

I also enjoy being able to do something with the important feelings of my life. I think that to be inarticulate can be a great suffering, and I'm glad that my loves, and my other feelings, have sometimes found their way into poems that fully express them.
The much-respected literary critic, Harold Bloom, suggested that Wilbur's poetry should be read "in the company of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens." That seems right, though I can see already that I'll be turning to Wilbur more often than Frost, and prefer his poems far and above those of Stevens.

Click Here to learn more about Richard Wilbur.
I'll be sharing a Richard Wilbur poem in tomorrow's Wednesday Words post. Click Here for poems, articles, and audio from Richard Wilbur.





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