Posts Tagged ‘Richard Wilbur’
The Poetry of Richard Wilbur
November 2, 2017
I don’t remember when I first starting reading Richard Wilbur’s poetry. But his death on October 14th, at age ninety-six, has returned me to my favorites among his immense output of poems. At the top of my list, indeed one of my favorite of all twentieth century poems, is the magical “Love Calls Us to…
Read MoreRemembering Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), Part 2
November 1, 2017
Richard Wilbur was always a formalist at heart, but one attuned to the rhythms of a living language. Like Frost and Stevens, he insisted on an underlying meter in his verse—most often a loose iambic pentameter line. In Williams’s free verse he often heard an underlying metrical beat which undergirded his poems. He grew up…
Read MoreRemembering Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), Part 1
October 31, 2017
It was back in the summer of 1995 during Image’s Glen Workshop that I had the opportunity to interview Dick Wilbur for Image. Wilbur was someone whose poetry—I am especially thinking here of poems like “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”—I’d read in my late teens and been drawn to, especially because…
Read MoreRichard Wilbur’s Poetry Captures Our Days
May 31, 2016
Last night I read a poem that showed me in a flash why I save evening-time for listening to classical music while I knit, or browsing through an art book, or reading fine poems like this one. I’ve said in a previous post that I keep a volume of poems by my bed for evening…
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