Video about Wilbur and Lowell, c. 1965
 

Sam, a large slice of the right-hand side of the picture is invisible and there's vacant strip on the left. Is there any way of moving the screen to the left so as to see all of it?

Hi Ann -- it's a link to a YouTube video, which is somehow framed wrongly when viewed from the everseradio webpage, but the framing is correct if you view the video directly from YouTube itself. If you hover your cursor around the top of the video, a title "USA: Poetry Episode Richard Wilbur and Robert Lowell" appears, and clicking on that takes you to the YouTube page.

Thanks for calling this to our attention, Sam, even if it did make me realize once again that there's Richard Wilbur, and then there's me, and we play in different ballparks, leagues, and probably universes. What particularly impressed me was Wilbur's inherent modesty, and his focus on the craft of poetry

Thank you, Brian. And thank you, Sam. And thank you, Richard Wilbur, who has gradually slid into my life, spreading through it and enriching it, since I first joined the Sphere and wondered who this man might be.
.

Many thanks, Sam.

I've watched this twice, and I'll watch it again. There is something entrancing about it: the sonorous voices, the man who speaks in full paragraphs, the other man whose thoughts dart quickly about and change direction like a dragonfly.

Water by Robert Lowell is a gorgeous poem, I think.

Thanks for sharing this.

What's fascinating to me is that, while Lowell is only four years older than Wilbur, in this clip he looks like he has a decade and a half or so on him.

Andrew, Lowell was a heavy smoker and had bouts of mental illness. That ages a man. He died at 60.

I know that he died quite young, and knew about the illness, but I guess in most of the images I've seen of him he seemed more, say, virile. It was just shocking to me.

Hi Michael,

I agree with what you say but would rephrase your note that Lowell "had bouts of mental illness." I'd say instead that he had bouts of mania and depression, while the mental illness framing them was permanent after onset.

Cheers,
John