Authors
Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
Bibliography
Search the archive for images
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Wilbur was one of the first of the American Poets Laureate; he has also been president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and over the course of his life he has won nearly every major prize that is given for poetry and translation. But in a century that favored blank verse and open forms, Wilbur has preferred to work in traditional modes: sonnets, villanelles, ballads – producing poem after poem that rhymes and scans in intricate, perfect ways. His dedication to those “traditional” arts and values can cause us to stop and wonder – when free verse is the mainstream fashion, and has been so since about 1920, what kinds of new work, in poetry, might be genuinely avant-garde?
1. Although most of Wilbur’s poems are in traditional forms, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” is probably his most famous poem, and this poem is in blank verse. How do you account for that?
2. Wilbur likes puns and wordplay. Locate six puns in these poems, and talk about how they work – how various meanings are compacted into one word. In Wilbur’s poems, are puns a sign of facetiousness? Do they have anything in common with how he “seriously” sees the world?
3. The mind-reader in “The Mind-Reader” seems to be a person very different from Richard Wilbur. This seer is a heavy-drinking, dissipated Italian, based on a man that Wilbur met and talked to in Rome. What might these two people, the clairvoyant and the American poet, have in common?