A skilled poet, editor, and teacher, Richard Wilbur is that rarity of the era, the cheerful poet. During World War II, his poetic voice emerged from experiences in southern France and Italy, where he first began writing with one purpose: to impose order on a world gone to pieces. He is notable for rejecting the me-centered confessionals of his contemporaries, and he has divided his lyric perfectionism between original collections and award-winning translations of Voltaire's Candide and the plays of Jean Racine and Molière. Along with an extraordinary number of citations for excellence, he has earned his share of lumps for avoiding tragedy and concealing ambivalence. Most of all, critics seem intent on castigating him for skirting the modern and postmodern obsessions with politicized verse and stylistic experimentation.
Richard Purdy Wilbur is a native New Yorker, born on March 1, 1921. He was a resident of Montclair, New Jersey, and graduated from Montclair High School and from Amherst, where he encountered poet-teacher Robert Frost. Before entering the army infantry, Wilbur married Mary Charlotte Hayes Ward, mother of their children: Ellen Dickinson, Christopher Hayes, Nathan Lord, and Aaron Hammond. After the war, Wilbur studied at Harvard and taught for three years as a junior fellow. After completing an M.A., with no intention of continuing as a poet, he published two major titles, The Beautiful Changes (1947) and Ceremony and Other Poems (1950).
