Richard Wilbur, A Personal Reminiscence

As I have previously written, R.P. Warren once told me to seek Richard Wilbur’s counsel on my efforts to write in meter and rhyme “cause he’s the best man we’ve got.” As a teenager I was far from ready for that. I had Wilbur’s Poems, the volume that collected his early books. What I had first fallen in love with were the translations, particularly the Francis Jammes “Going to Paradise,” Philippe de Thaun’s “Pelican,” and Baudelaire’s “L’invitation au Voyage.” I was making my first, halting efforts to translate bawdy epigrams from the Greek Anthology, and it was inconceivable to me that anyone could produce such flawless poems in English which so accurately captured the great originals I could dimly comprehend with my rudimentary grasp of French.

By 1977 I was thoroughly acquainted with Wilbur and stood in awe. Here was a fellow only 30 years my senior who was bidding fair to succeed Auden as the great poet of the English language. By that time I was pretty fluent in iambic pentameter, and I sent him a sheaf of my long, rhymed, narrative poems. He promptly responded that although he made it a rule never to respond to such over-the-transom communications, he was making an exception in my case. He crisply told me what I was doing right, but added “Just because you are writing on the themes of Cavafy does not excuse you from the task of sufficiently charging your language.” I was crushed, but better, I was forced to rethink my entire poetic enterprise. We corresponded on occasion during the next two years, after which I started farming and hunting with a passion and writing in densely rhymed trimeter.

In 1994 it was time for me to crawl out from under my rock, and I wrote Wilbur again. This time the response was far more collegial: “I am surprised and delighted to see how far you have come. Everywhere I look in this manuscript I find accurate words, live rhythms.” Of course I was absolutely elated. Alan and I were soon bound for the Virgin Islands with a side trip to Key West. Upon arrival I called to ask for directions, a map of the island before me. Dick said, “You’ll note the island is a grid with one diagonal street.” I said, “Oh, you’re near the cemetary.” “Very near the cemetary, young man,” he laughed. We made an appointment for the following morning, and I proceeded to become violently ill with anticipation. Fortified by several jolts of Jack Daniels’, I found my way to Windsor Lane. Having never even seen a picture of Wilbur, and expecting this meticulous crafter of verse to be small, Alan and I were surprised to encounter a jovial and enormous fellow.

I was so naïve, so isolated, that I thought I was meeting the only competent formal poet writing in English. I managed to ask how our great art had died. He gave me copies of The Formalist, The Epigrammatist, and Tim Steele’s Missing Measures, assured me that a resurgence of verse was gaining momentum, and urged me to get in touch with Tim and begin publishing. That evening we took the Wilburs to dinner, and my first question was how had he managed to outlive and outwrite so many of his contemporaries. Charlee laughed merrily and assured us that it was solely due to his having married so well. It was apparent to both of us that these people were deeply in love, and I recited them the very early ME lyric “Alisoun,” with which they were unfamiliar. They were touched, and our friendship with that remarkable couple dates from that day.

There would be many trips to Key West, many trips to Cummington. Soon I was armed with a reading list, Robert Francis, Tim Steele, Sam Gwynn, poets I’d never heard of who deeply delighted me. But above all I was re-reading Wilbur and being influenced as I was in my youth when I had come to terms with Frost, Yeats, and Hardy. My own verse had been so bleak, and here was a poet whose understanding of the human condition was profoundly redemptive and grounded in a faith I did not share. As I read in manuscript such poems as “For C” and “Mayflies,” the great work of Wilbur’s old age, he became my favorite Christian poet since Herbert. When Suzanne Doyle, a poet as black as Murphy, read Mayflies, the book, she wrote me a note I paraphrase in the final couplet of this little poem, written in the Lake District last year:

Coniston, The Old Man

Give me today the sturdy boots
to crush this springing sod,
these florets sheathed within their shoots,
I could not walk with God.

A friend wrote of a poet who
merits his Maker’s love,
“Grace has found him in ways that you
and I are ignorant of.”

Yeats told us a man must must choose between the life and the work. Richard has succeeded spendidly in both. For his friendship, his patronage, and above all his example, I am profoundly grateful.

Wonderful story, Tim. And I think the phrase "accurate words, live rhythms" is a wonderfully concise explanation of what we're all trying to achieve. Thanks for giving us this glimpse.

I'd like to invite all our members to post their own personal reactions to Wilbur on this thread. Is there a poem which is particularly valued by you, and why? Or if you want to be a skunk at the picnic, go right ahead!

Over the next couple of days, I shall post the eight poems I'm asking Dick to comment on, each on its own thread. He won't appear until Feb 4 at the earliest, and I welcome your comments on these poems in the meantime. I think they are fairly representative of our best work here at the Sphere. In the meantime, continue to post your questions for Wilbur on the adjacent thread.

yours, Tim

Well, Wilbur's influence on my work goes back to high school, when I found his translation of Moliere's "The Learned Ladies" on the bargain table at Waldenbooks. I bought it, read it, and loved it. That, along with Chaucer (I'd also bought the Wife of Bath and Miller's Tale coloring books) inspired me to write narrative verse plays, which got me to the finals of the California State Speech Competitions three years running in the Original Prose and Poetry category.

From the prologue of one:

...a snobbish headmistress with her hair in a bun,
seventeen little girls, and a gunslinging nun...
Before us now the scene unfurls:
St. Augustina's School for Girls,
a building of brick, with stories four.
A nun is standing at the door.

There was much more, of course. Mass combat, dragon attacks, schoolgirls with grenades, that sort of thing, all performed as a one-man show.

I'm working as a fantasy novelist now, so please thank him for me.

As a 43-year old engineer with an MBA in management, I have absolutely no education in poetry or literature. Nevertheless, I took an interest in the subject a few years back and started reading everything I could find in terms of anthologies and "how-to" manuals. Then, after browsing the poetry section in Barnes and Noble, Borders, et. al., I was convinced that all contemporary poetry was either too abstract, exclusively free verse, overly confessional, etc. So, I clung to Frost and other anchors.

But then by accident, I found Wibur's collection. My version has so many dog ears that it's a mini-accordion!

I'm inspired by his ability to reach out and grab me - rhyme, lively meter, wit, complexity of thought, varied stanza forms, breadth of subject matter, etc.

Anyone who loves Wilbur should purchase <u>Mayflies: New Poems and Translations</u>. It's a delightful read.

He will always be my standard bearer!

Glenn



[This message has been edited by GlennNicholls (edited January 29, 2003).]

In Ireland, although I had written some fiction and always read a good deal of verse, I had encountered plenty of fiction, but no poetry from the United States, apart from Poe and Longfellow, a poem of two by Alan Seeger and a few by Robert Frost. I first remember hearing of Richard Wilbur around 1980 in the introduction by John Holmes to Langford Reed’s “Rhyming Dictionary,” where he was quoted on the subject of rhyme. Around the same time, I read a very illuminating interview with Mr Wilbur by John Ciardi, “The Genie In The Bottle” in “Writing Poetry”, again by John Holmes.

When I recently made a real attempt to write poetry myself, and then metric verse, I found his name was everywhere, not only on the Eratosphere Boards, but in works by Mary Kinzie, Mary Oliver, Anthony Steele, Judson Jerome, Steve Kowit and others, with extracts or full versions of his remarkable poems, and, of course, I found him in anthologies such as "The Penguin Book Of The Sonnet" and "101 Sonnets" among others. Only recently I was delighted by his “Parable” in Mary Oliver’s “ Rules For The Dance.” and by poems such as “Lot’s Wife” and the stunning “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” What an example to us these poems are! I still have a lot of ground to make up and am looking forward to reading Mr Wilbur’s collected works.



[This message has been edited by oliver murray (edited January 29, 2003).]

Tim, you really should write memoirs of all the poets you've known. I know you have years to go before you sleep, but I wish you'd post more of these anecdotes on Lariat, then eventually pull them all together in a book! Or several books.

I have no Richard Wilbur stories, but I've been dipping into his Moliere translations; two of the exceptional characteristics of his dramatic/translation style are elegance and focus. He never wastes words. Even when translating references to prostitution, he is the epitome of classy.

One example appears in Mayflies:

Night:
It's not the prettiest of tasks
That Jupiter would have me do!
There's a sweet name for creatures who
Perform the service that he asks!

Mercury:
For a young goddess, you embrace
Old-fashioned notions, it seems to me:
To do such service isn't base
Except in those of low degree.

When one is blessed with high estate and standing,
All that one does is good as gold,
And things have different names, depending
On what position one may hold.

Moliere's satire bears many similarites to the historical commedia dell'arte of Italy, which used stock characters and broad pratfalls. Wilbur's elegance provides a distinct counterpoint to the wonderful low mockeries, as in the following sarcastic speech by the male Sganarelle in The School for Husbands:

I see: I mustn't wear what clothes I please,
But must submit to fashion's wise decrees!
Do you propose, by precepts so bizarre,
Dear elder brother—for that is what you are
By 20 blessed years, I must confess,
Although of course it couldn't matter less—
Do you propose, I say, to force me to
Adorn myself as your young dandies do?
To wear those little hats which leave their brains,
Such as they are, exposed to wind and rains,
And those immense blond wigs which hide their features
And make one doubt that they are human creatures?
Those tiny doublets, cut off at armpit-level,
Those collars hanging almost to the navel,
Those sleeves that drag through soups and gravy boats,
And those huge breeches, loose as petticoats?
Those small, beribboned slippers, too neat for words,
Which make them look like feather-footed birds?
Those rolls of lace they force their legs to wear
Like the leg irons that slaves and captives bear,
So that we see each fop and fashion plate
Walk like a pigeon, with a waddling gait?
You'd have me dress like that? I note with loathing
That you're attired in just such modish clothing.

I've decided on one or two questions which I'll post on the other Wilbur thread.

The other day I got one of the nicest compliments I've ever received. A woman I know, who is a high school English teacher, attended a professional meeting in Key West where Richard Wilbur was the keynote speaker. After Wilbur's reading, as I understand the story, she hurried to the front of a long line to get her book signed by the poet. She apologized for the rush but explained that she was in a hurry to make a plane connection back to Beaumont. "Beaumont?" said Mr. Wilbur. "You must know Sam Gwynn. I like his poetry."

My correspondence with Wilbur dates from my undergraduate days. I had seen his translations of three Villon ballades in Poetry, and I hastily churned out what I thought was a ballade and sent it to him. How I got his address remains a mystery, but soon I received one of those meticulously typed postcards in response. He was kind, and has unfailingly been so since. He did not bother to point out that what I thought was a ballade employed about a dozen rhymes instead of the requisite three.

My first meeting with him dates from roughly the same period, the spring of 1969, I believe. I drove from Davidson up to Roanoke to hear him read at Hollins College on the occasion of some sort of undergraduate literary festival. By the time I met him, I knew his poems fairly well (I can't remember if we were using The Poems of Richard Wilbur in a class or whether I'd bought it on my own). As I recall, Walking to Sleep had just appeared, and I spoke with him briefly at the signing. That he remembered my name and the poem I'd sent still strikes me as miraculous, but one learns to accept the miraculous where Mr. Wilbur is concerned.

If my three wishes are ever granted, one of them would be just to have dinner and drinks with Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur, as Tim Murphy and Alan Sullivan have done on several occasions. We had a date for such an event a few years back, but the Wilburs were delayed in getting to Key West and my wife and I had to leave before they came to town. Time and distance being what they are, I guess that four or five very quick visits after readings over the years will have to suffice.

My short list of favorite Wilbur poems is no short list at all, and I would indeed wear out my welcome here if I were to attempt to list them all. If I may confine myself to a single poem, I direct the reader to "Year's End." There are several worlds packed into that short lyric--it is as near a perfect poem as I have ever read, with the exception, of course, of a couple dozen more by the same poet.

I salute Tim and Alan for making his comments available to Eratosphere, and I look forward to reading them in coming days.

When I attended Brown University in the early 70's, we were very fortunate to be visited quite often by fine poets. The readings were generally held in student lounges with about 50-75 people in attendance. When Richard Wilbur came to town, the reading took place in a large church down the hill to accomodate the hundreds of people who wanted to attend.

After he read "Love Calls Us To The Things of This World," I remember that Mr. Wilbur seemed upset because he had apparently read one of the words incorrectly (a small detail involving a preposition, I believe). I for one certainly hadn't noticed, but I remember that he seemed very disappointed at his minor mistake, and he told us that the slip had, in effect, ruined the poem. I was eighteen years old, newly interested in writing poetry, and his chagrin at such a small mistake was what made the biggest impression on me. It may seem obvious now, but it taught me the importance of every word.

He signed my copy of his collected works, and I proudly held onto that volume (with growing enjoyment of its contents) until three years ago when it burned up in a fire. I have a more recent Collected works now, this time in hardcover, but it lacks the autograph.

"Love Calls Us To The Things of This World" may be (predictably?) my favorite Wilbur poem, but there are many (including some written forty or fifty years later) that come quite close. I can't imagine a more "accurate" or moving rendition of my own daily waking than "The soul shrinks/ From all that it is about to remember" or a more satisfying resolution whereby the soul becomes unshrunk (I love those "ruddy gallows" and the "backs of thieves"). This is a poem that employs humor and wit yet (for me and many others) can move a person to tears.

These days I think we should be reading "Advice for a Prophet" more than ever. What more "accurate" phrase is there than "Our slow, unreckoning hearts"?

"Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends."
--WBY

I might not be much good, but I'm damn lucky, always finding myself in the right place to be found, by Warren, Wilbur, Hecht, Mezey, Espaillat, Gwynn. Et Cetera.

It has never been my privilege to teach, nor will it be. But I can spread my luck around, and I look forward to Richard's comments on the best we have to offer.

Timothy

Until No Word of Farewell, Sam's Selected Poems, appeared at Story Line Press, he was the ultimate stealth poet, his first trade edition being out of print, and his chapbooks hard to find. My first opportunity to read him in depth came the first day I took Wilbur sailing. He showed up at the Bight in Key West with Sam's "Area Code of God," and said, "You and Mr. Gwynn should be reading one another."

A guy who hid out in Fargo, ND, for twenty years is calling me the "ultimate stealth poet"? I say, "Ha!" I'd prefer to be known as the "ultimate inept career-manager poet."

[This message has been edited by R. S. Gwynn (edited January 30, 2003).]

Perhaps the experience of one English reader of Wilbur may be of interest.

I first came across the poetry of Richard Wilbur in the winter of 1962 in Donald Hall’s eclectic and fascinating Penguin anthology Contemporary American Poetry. Hall included eight poems: "Tywater", "‘A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness’", Museum Piece", "After the Last Bulletins", "She", "The Undead", "In the Smoking Car" and "Shame". I confess that no poem in this group made a great impression on me at the time. I found other poems and other poets much more stimulating - Lowell and Berryman, (whom I knew already), Nemerov, Justice, Snyder, Levertov (mainly because of her lovely poem about the county of Essex, her birthplace) and Mezey. The two who made the most powerful, indeed the most lasting, impression were Anthony Hecht and James Wright, though of Wright’s work only his 1963 collection, The Branch Will Not Break, has continued to sustain my interest. (Among volumes of American verse published in my lifetime - since 1945 - and which I happen to have come across, this remains on my list of favourites.) As to Wilbur, hindsight suggests that a much more enticing selection of his work up to 1963 could have been made. So it was that, at first, he passed me by.

Some years later, I began coming across Wilbur’s poems in standard school anthologies. Those which turned up most often were "Digging for China", "The Pardon", "The Death of a Toad" and "First Snow in Alsace. Then, in 1975, in the library of the school where I worked, I found a copy of the Meridian Books anthology, New Poets of England and America, edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack and Louis Simpson. This, which had first appeared in the States in 1957 and had been reprinted four times up to 1960, the date of the school copy, preceded Hall’s Penguin volume by six years. When I discovered that the librarian had tossed the book out because its spine was irreparably split, I retrieved it from the bin - and have it to this day.

The anthology was interesting in that, under the slogan "Maturity No Object", it gathered in alphabetical order of surnames fifty-two British and American poets, representing each being with a generous number of poems. In bringing together such writers as Charles Causley, Donald Davie, W. S. Graham, Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill and Philip Larkin (from the UK) and Edgar Bowers, Henri Coulette, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, Donald Justice, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Robert Mezey, Howard Nemerov and Adrienne Rich (from the USA), it created a wider context in which Wilbur’s thirteen poems could be placed. No doubt for copyright reasons, none of Wilbur’s thirteen appeared in Hall’s later UK anthology. I was both pleased to have made this find and frustrated because I realized that, had I come across the two anthologies in the order in which they had been published, my initial view of Wilbur might have been very different.

I rehearse this history to illustrate the influence chance often has on our reading and, for those of use who aspire to be writers, perhaps upon our writing as well.

What would I have learned from Wilbur had I had better access to him in my teens and twenties (the period I have been describing)? They are, of course, the lessons all of us who have admired his virtues have sought to learn - his metrical brilliance, for instance, and, more profoundly, his joyful and serious wit (in this context, these are not contradictory adjectives); but I would single out, too, his expressive management of the dynamics of the English sentence.

In 1971, Faber published an English edition of Walking to Sleep. Very soon, this joined my private list of favourite single volumes of post-War American verse, a diverse gathering, which, apart from Wright’s book, includes Conrad Aiken’s The Morning Song of Lord Zero, Anthony Hecht’s The Hard Hours and Millions of Strange Shadows, Galway Kinnell’s The Past, Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead, Jim Powell’s It Was Fever That Made the World and Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems (a "cheat", this, inasmuch as all but the last two sections date from before 1945).

There are so many fine poems in Walking to Sleep - exemplary in form and style and, in various way, moving - that it is hard to make a selection. Those that have endured with particular clarity include "Seed Leaves", "Fern-Beds in Hampshire County", "A Miltonic Sonnet for Mr. Johnson etc." and "A Late Aubade". I have presented all of these to Advanced level students in the past; all struck an appropriate chord. As a head teacher, I used from time to time to read "A Wood" to school assemblies, a morning gathering of up to eight hundred pupils. Its "message" - that "no one style…is recommended" - seemed to have particular resonance in that context.

Forced to pick one poem, however, I should, after bridling, pick three, the three poems in the set entitled "Running". I love the beautifully managed development of the whole series, but especially the way Wilbur plays with images of discontinuity and progression in the third poem, "Dodwell’s Road": the jogger who slows "to a swagger" at the crown of the road, the "Loud burden of streams at run-off" sounding in his ears, the "sun’s rocket frazzled in blown tree heads", but who nonetheless asserts that he is still "part of that great going", adding, however, that he strolls now and is "watchful". In an echo, perhaps, of that famous passage from Lucretius - "Inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla animantum / et quasi cursores vitaï lampada tradunt" ("and in a short space the generations of living creatures change, and, like runners, pass on the torch of life") - the poem ends thus:

You, whoever you are,
If you want to walk with me you must step lively.
I run, too, when the mood offers,
Though the god of that has left me.

But why in the hell spoil it?
I make a clean gift of my young running
To the two boys who break into view,
Hurdling the rocks and racing,

Their dog dodging before them
This way and that, his yaps flushing a pheasant
Who lifts now from the blustery grass
Flying full tilt already.

Since then, of course, we have had The Mind-Reader, New Poems (1987), a Collected and now Mayflies - a "clean gift" and a challenge to us all.

Clive Watkins

I'd forgotten about that pheasant, Clive. Tim Murphy has never quoted that poem to me! Interestingly, I had purchased and read the Hall anthology before I learned of the existence of the earlier Hall, Pack, and Simpson one. I think you're right in that the selection of Wilbur poems in Hall is not as good as it could have been, though I doubt that a copyright problem was the cause. Maybe R. W. can clear this up for us.

It’s funny how vividly we remember the details of brief encounters with the people we really admire. In the summer of 1992 I managed to spot Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur seated at one of the long tables in the refectory at Sewanee. The seat next to them was briefly vacant. I ran as fast as I dared with a loaded tray of food and asked Mr. Wilbur if the chair was open to the bold, or was it reserved for the meritorious? He replied that the seat was free, and so, along with some other nearby participants in the writers’ conference, where he was visiting to give a reading, I got to talk with the Wilburs for a few minutes. I was aware that we had several mutual friends and acquaintances, including a couple of my old teachers, John Nims and Richard Eberhart, so it was easy to find topics of conversation, and although I could present myself as nothing more than a classics prof. who still harbored hopes of writing poetry, I was able to boast of having appeared once alongside Mr. Wilbur in print, since my first poem in The New Yorker had appeared alongside his splendid “Icarium Mare” in 1979. I found the Wilburs most genial and thoughtful of those around them, as I think is consistent with all reports!

Richard Wilbur was one of the few reasons to be hopeful about American poetry in the late 1970’s, when I was starting to get serious about writing, but almost everyone seemed to have forsaken meter and rhyme. I suppose, for many of us, he was an icon, of sorts, a status that may not have been entirely fair to the object of our admiration! It’s great to realize that, though time has chastised so many of my youthful enthusiasms, it has so thoroughly vindicated this one. It seems characteristically generous of Mr. Wilbur to participate in the Sphere as Tim’s distinguished guest and to comment on the fine roster of poems that Tim has lined up. Many thanks to him and a hearty welcome!

My first encounter with Richard Wilbur’s poetry came in 1983. I was nineteen, visiting my grandmother and uncle in New York, when I happened upon a volume of his poems at a Barnes & Noble in midtown. I had been writing almost exclusively metrical verse since age thirteen (to the faint embarrassment of several of my teachers), but all the contemporary poetry I read in school was free verse. Opening Mr. Wilbur’s poems at random and beginning to read, I was immediately electrified. Here were the poems I had been longing to read, beautiful, graceful poems that moved and inspired me like the great poems of the past. I remember thinking, wonderingly and with a kind of triumph, “So poets still write this way!” I would soon figure out that nobody else wrote like Richard Wilbur; nevertheless, with his work as an introduction I became aware of a revival of interest in traditional verse. My feelings of isolation receded, and his example heartened me in my early attempts to learn the craft.

I owe my opportunity to meet Mr. Wilbur and his wife, Charlee, to Tim Murphy. In the winter of 2001, after I had published a chapbook with R.L. Barth, Tim urged me to send a copy to the Wilburs, to whom he had already mentioned me. My husband Jeremy and I were then living in Miami. Tim instructed that I should, in the letter accompanying my chapbook, offer to take the Wilburs to lunch or dinner on a visit to Key West. Without Tim’s insistence that I make this overture, I would never have had the courage to do it. Soon, I received a charming note from Charlee, asking me to call them to arrange a date for the meeting. Being pregnant at the time, I couldn’t fortify myself for the call with a shot of whiskey, and I was dumbstruck when a mellifluous male voice answered. Somehow I managed to stammer out my name, and somehow everything was arranged.

On St. Patrick’s Day, 2001, Jeremy and I met the Wilburs at Louie’s, a wonderful old seafood restaurant on the water. What struck us most strongly about both of them was their charm, geniality, warm affection for one another, and utter lack of pretension. Charlee had undergone knee surgery not long before, and Dick (for so he introduced himself) was sweetly solicitous of her. For about two hours we had a wide-ranging, general conversation in which Charlee and Jeremy were fully included. We talked about poetry, but also about politics (the 2000 election still being fresh on everyone’s minds), living in Florida, their children and grandchildren, and our coming new arrival. We found ourselves telling them that we were thinking of giving the baby my surname, since I am one of four daughters and there are already several grandsons on Jeremy’s side to carry on his name. Dick and Charlee were immediately receptive to the idea and, once we had explained our reasoning, warmly approved it. They reminisced with obvious pleasure about their own early years of marriage and parenthood. Then, well into the lunch, Charlee suddenly announced that she wanted to drink to something, and told us that it was, that very day, the sixtieth anniversary of their first date, when they were both college students. Jeremy and I had the privilege not only of sharing that anniversary with them, but of hearing the story behind it. Finally, when lunch was over, Dick signed the copies of his books I had brought, and before we parted Charlee made me promise to send them a birth announcement. As soon as we returned home, I wrote down everything I could remember about the day.

Exactly four months later, our daughter Sophia was born. As promised, I sent the Wilburs an announcement and a photo. A week or two later, when Sophia was in the throes of colic, my haze of exhaustion lifted with the arrival of a neatly typed postcard. My favorite living poet pronounced the birth “wonderful news,” thought that our daughter looked “goodnatured and sapient,” and added, “I have found myself singing, ‘For she’s a jolly good fellow, For she’s a jolly good fellow, Sophia Rose Tufariello, Which nobody can deny.’” Of course it got pride of place in Sophia’s baby book. And what a story to tell her someday!

I join the chorus of voices warmly welcoming Richard Wilbur to Eratosphere. And Tim, a heartfelt thanks–-for everything.

Wonderful.

I first encountered Mr. Wilbur's work in an anthology edited by John Ciardi in 1950, titled "Mid-Century American Poets." I was in Hunter College at the time, studying poetics, reading, and already certain, by then, that poetry would occupy me for the rest of my life. That book riveted my attention: some fourteen poets are in it (my ravaged copy is still in my possession), including Shapiro, Nims, Lowell, Jarrell, Bishop and Schwartz. But the voice that called me at once and for good was that of Richard Wilbur, represented by ten early poems that all told me what I wanted to try for. Don't we all!

The essay that introduces the poems is "The Genie in the Bottle," as exciting a discovery as the poems themselves. Years later, after having read many more Wilbur poems, I came accross his "Responses: Prose Pieces 1953-1976." That, too, became holy writ, and still is.

I've had the good fortune to meet Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur on several occasions, and have found them as open and simple as we never expect the great to be. The living voice of the poet is the same as the voice of the poems, filled with the same grace, equanimity and generosity.

Catherine, what a story! You never told me! Here's a story Richard told on himself tonight. In January he gave a reading in Key West, and after reading many perfectly straightworward poems he read "Lying." He told the audience that when he first read it to Charlee, she said "Dick you've finally written a poem which is incomprehensible from beginning to end." When he finished reading "Lying," a man in the back of the hall, shouted "God bless your wife!"