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).]
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