Richard Wilbur is not only a poet but also a translator of French dramas. Born on March 1st, 1921 in New York City, he grew up to attend Amherst College. He then married a woman named "Charlee." His college degree carried him to obtain an M.A. at Harvard. Before obtaining his master's, however, he was a member of the U.S. Army as a cryptographer during World War II. After leaving the army in 1945 because of the endless casualties, he left in the position of staff sergeant. He taught at Harvard, Wellesley, and Wesleyan University. Later, he became a writer-in-residence at Smith College. His poetic works include sophisticated meters and fluid verses that make up an imitable diction. In terms of his topics and style of work, he can be compared to poets such as Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and W. H. Auden. His poems are philosophically rich in content but some critics claim that his works are rather simple and lack depth because of how effortless his message comes across through his usage of words and diction. His talent may have gone unnoticed because �[a]mong minor poets he is allowed to be most major, but among major poets he is not even considered the most minor� (Modern American Poetry).
What Attracted Me
Last year in Mrs. Schmidt�s class, the students did a poetry unit towards the end of the year just like this year. Almost every day, Mrs. Schmidt would pass out a poem for the class to analyze after each student had analyzed it individually at home or silently in class. Richard Wilbur�s "Boy at the Window" became the one poem that I really liked and the one poem that I can still recall from last year. Does the attraction come from his elegant use of language, his fluidity or his use of philosophies and his content? I doubt it is either or but rather a complex concoction of these two main elements that has drawn me into his works. At first, I was not too sure about the poet I wanted to do. As we went deeper into the unit, I had a few ideas considering mainly female poets such as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Dorothy Parker. As I browsed a website or two, the name of Richard Wilbur automatically caught my attention. The day before we had to make our poets official, I did a little research on American poets just to secure my decision on Richard Wilbur. From my investigation at AmericanPoems.com, I found that the following statement sealed the envelope for me: �So formidable are his verse-making skills and his native wit that even the longest and most philosophical of his poems (see "The Mind-Reader" or "Walking to Sleep") carry the reader effortlessly along.�
What I Learned
Richard Wilbur focuses mainly on the passageway from adolescence to adulthood as seen in "Boy at the Window" and "The Writer." Each piece views adulthood as a negative entity, most likely because of how Richard Wilbur was involved in the second world war. This is a legitimate thought because he had just gotten out of college and had just been married--two signs of transferring over into adulthood. I enjoy these poems because he usually hides this theme under some kind of metaphor. In "Boy at the Window," the cold world of adulthood is symbolized by a snowman, and in "The Writer," the transformation lies beneath the story of a girl writing. I also learned that he wrote a poem about his wife called "June Light" and another poem called "Advice to a Prophet" which discusses the essential collaboration between man and nature. It also has the basis of the war in there. In the end, Wilbur's main inspiration for writing must have been the war. I find it rather amusing especially since most of the biographies do not focus on his involvement in the war. They do not go in depth so it does not seem as if the war had affected him, but as one reads his poems, the influence of World War II on Wilbur is evident.
