Biography

Richard Wilbur was born in 1921, the son of a mother whose family worked in newspaper editing and a father who was a portrait painter.  He grew up in a rental house on the New England estate of an English millionaire.  It was there that he gained both the intellectual refinement characteristic of much of his poetry and the love of nature that would serve as the focus for many of his ideas.

 In 1938, at the age of 17, Wilbur began attending Amherst College, where he essentially began his career as a literary scholar.  He studied seventeenth century metaphysical English poetry and gained an appreciation for finely structured verse.

He graduated in 1942, after which he enlisted in the US army and took part in the final days of World War II, including the invasion of southern France.  The tension and uncertainty of the war was what ultimately caused Wilbur to turn to writing poetry as a means of security.  He used it to make order of the confusion induced by the war. 

Upon returning to the US following the war, Wilbur began studies at Harvard College, where he obtained his MA in 1950.  During this time also his first collection of poetry, Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, was published.  Following his degree he became an associate professor at Harvard for four years, and after which taught English at Wellesley and Wesleyan Colleges and worked as a writer-in-residence at Smith College.  During this time he published several more works of poetry, including Things of This World, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. 

In 1987 Wilbur was named the second poet laureate of the United States by President Reagan, to be followed by Stanley Kunitz.  He currently resides in the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts, where he is taking in silence so that he may return to words with more force.