Optimist: Richard Wilbur

“‘I [Richard Wilbur] feel that the universe is full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good’”(Lewis, Daniel). Richard Wilbur had a positive viewpoint on life during most of his career. He would convey the beautiful energy he felt from nature in his poetry and other works. Wilbur was someone who stayed close to his ideals and faith even though he had some critical backlash. He liked to keep a schedule, but he also went with the flow as seen in his poetry. Wilbur retired from poetry after his last work was published in 2010, but he continued to write and enjoy his hobbies.

Wilbur died in October of 2017, but his positive influence on the literary world is still remembered in his poetry today. Richard Wilbur was born in New York City on the first of March in 1921 and was raised in North Caldwell, New Jersey. His background showed his ancestors to be original settlers of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. “His family, however, was not especially affluent, and his parents reflected an unusual mixture of artistic and middle-class values”(Gioia, Dana). When his family moved from New York City to New Jersey, his parents bought a pre-revolutionary stone house on a 500-acre private estate (Lewis, Daniel). The land emersed Wilbur into a more rural space, while also distancing him from urban life. He became close with his younger brother, Lawrence, due to the solidarity. He also learned to appreciate nature and how to be observant with his time in that house.

Wilbur adopted his creativity from his parents’ careers and love of the arts. His father, Lawrence Wilbur, ran away from his Nebraskan home at the age of sixteen to pursue an education of art in New York City. He became successful as a commercial artist, but later became a portrait painter. Richard Wilbur’s parents met while in New York City. Richard’s mother, Helen Purdy Wilbur, came from a long line of journalists including her father and grandfather who were newspaper editors. “Not surprisingly, the future poet’s earliest ambitions combined his parents’ two backgrounds; the young Wilbur initially hoped to be a newspaper cartoonist”(Gioia, Dana). As Wilbur grew up he found ways to show his talents and hobbies. He worked on the school newspaper until he graduated from Montclair High School in 1938. He then attended Amherst College, where he gained a bachelor’s degree while contributing to the campus newspaper and magazine.

Wilbur married Charlotte Ward in 1942 while bettering his education at Amherst. He joined the army in 1943, after his graduation, hoping to be a cryptographer, “but was denied the necessary clearance because his leftist views had raised an official suspicion of ‘disloyalty’”(Lewis, Daniel). He later commented that he did attend a Marxist function at Amherst, but he slept through it. After being in the army from 1943 to 1945 during World War II, Wilbur attended Harvard University where he earned a master’s degree. In 1947, Wilbur not only graduated, but he also released his first collection of poems Beautiful Changes. He was then admitted as a Junior Fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows, which is the university’s highest honor for a scholar, for three years. Spending three years as a fellow is the equivalent of earning a doctorate, so Harvard then hired him as an assistant professor in 1950 for four years.

After his stay at Harvard, Wilbur became a professor at Wesleyan University for twenty more years while he helped found the influential Wesleyan University Press poetry series. During those twenty years at Wesleyan, Wilbur got every third semester off from teaching to focus on his writing. He then moved to Smith College and taught there for ten years and ended his teaching career in 1986 back at Amherst (Lewis, Daniel). During his academic career, he continued to write poems, children books, prose, and translations. He had many influences for his writing. His rural childhood home taught him to be observant of nature and many of his poems were written using those observations.

During his time in the war, Wilbur found solace in Edgar Allen Poe and started sending his own poems home to his wife. His wife later showed the poems to an editor friend, André du Bouchet, who convinced Reynal and Hitchcock to publish his work. The firm soon called Wilbur and asked if they could publish a book of his poetry. He was pleased to have such an easy debut and Robert Frost even admired his work(Lambert, Craig). Wilbur was also excited to have Frost’s praise because he was his friend and role model. Frost and Wilbur became fast friends at Harvard because Charlotte Wilbur’s grandfather was the first editor to publish Frost’s poems. The friendship made a large impact on Wilbur who was deeply influenced by Frost’s poetic style(Gioia, Dana). Another poet who inspired Richard Wilbur was Elizabeth Bishop. “‘I’ve found that if I needed to be prodded or reawakened by some other poet, I often turned to someone like Elizabeth Bishop whose poetry is full of surprising realizations of fact’”(Sofield, David). Her imagery motivated him to write something of the same prominence. He was inspired to write by studying the work of many other poets, so he continued to pursue his poetry.

Richard Wilbur’s literary career was filled with many accomplishments and awards. He published ten volumes of poetry and various translations of plays. Some of his most famous works included his translated Misanthrope, his third book Things of This World, and his seventh book New and Collected Poems. His translated works came from various languages: French, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian (Lambert, Craig). Critics rarely questioned Wilbur’s professionalism and skill in translating plays by Moliere, Voltaire, and Racine. David H. Van Biema of People once said that Wilbur’s English version of The Misanthrope made it widely accessible for the first time and John Ciardi praised his translation compared to others’ for finding words equivalent to the French translation, instead of lowering the academic level of the play (Share, Don).

Wilbur not only translated plays, but he also wrote lyrics for a few musicals including a Broadway musical Candide. He collaborated with Lillian Hellman and Leonard Bernstein on the musical based on Voltaire’s novella and became the primary lyricist. “Candide opened to favorable reviews, ‘but the praise, by Brooks Atkinson [’17] in the New York Times, for example, made it sound too highbrow for block-ticket buying,’ Wilbur says. The show closed after a three-month run… Though technically a flop, Candide has triumphed in the long run, thanks to a continuing series of revisions and revivals”( Lambert, Craig).After his work in theater, Wilbur continued his poetic career with the publication of several other anthologies. Wilbur’s Things of This World won both the National Book Award and his first Pulitzer Prize in 1957. Juror Louis Untermeyer said that Wilbur’s poetry was “fastidious” and most commonly described as elegant with a sense of emotion hidden underneath the words. Untermeyer believed “in his half-wondering, half-whimsical way… such ordinary subjects are translated into a highly personal poetry, witty and grave and intellectually provocative”(Untermeyer, Louis).

His seventh book New and Collected Poems gained more critical acclaim than his third book and even earned him a second Pulitzer Prize in 1989. The jury report from his second Pulitzer Prize said that the poems in his seventh book were thought-provoking, insightful, and leave the readers wanting more (Fischer, Heinz-Dietrich). He became the second poet laureate of the United States and was the only living person with two Pulitzer Prizes for poetry(Gioia, Dana). His witty and understandable writing style also led him to write children’s books to help educate them about the English language and word-play. Wilbur learned from his father how to paint at a young age, so he was able to self-illustrate all of his children’s books. Starting in 1973 he published Opposites, the first book of a trio, that was devoted to teaching children about synonyms and antonyms.

After the trilogy, he published three more books separately. “Wilbur’s children’s literature often investigates language and words in a witty, inventive way. Jennifer M. Brabander of Horn Book noted that ‘Wilbur’s poems are filled with small, satisfying surprises’” (Share, Don). He also published a book of prose during his poetic career. Mary Maxwell from Boston Review mentioned in the review that readers may be surprised with the content because of its somber undertones, but overall optimism (Maxwell, Mary). The praise from critics was not always constant, though. While Richard Wilbur “…was often cited as an heir to Robert Frost…” and had the privilege of gaining a following beyond the poetry community, he was not always favored by society (Woo, Elaine). “Of Wilbur’s second book, Ceremony and Other Poems (1950), Randall Jarrell famously complained that Wilbur ‘never goes too far, but he never goes far enough’”(Share, Don). He was often accused of sacrificing emotion in his poetry for fluidity. Some critics even speculated that he might have been too scared to face real-world situations like war and politics, but later mentioned that his third book directly deals with negative issues (Share, Don).

Wilbur may have written some poems focusing on negative issues, but he tried to stay positive and energetic most of his career. He focused his work on nature, love, and creativity. His career lost acclaim again in the late 50s when poetry styles changed. He continued to use the same style of optimistically composed poems with “traditional patterns of rhyme and meter” throughout his career, but the public taste had changed. Society’s interest in his “dedication to urbanity and metrical poise” started to diminish with the times and his critical acclaim began to suffer (Share, Don). He soon fixed his reputation with the publication of New and Collected Poems and his earning of many highly distinguished awards including the Bollingen Prize, the Robert Frost Medal, and the Wallace Stevens Award. One of Wilbur’s popular poems in his third book, Things of This World, contained his usual optimistic observation that was criticized by some. “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” (see Appendix) was one of Richard Wilbur’s most famous poems.

The poem flows with its imagery and its structure. While the poem is not an official blank-verse, it shows moments of iambic pentameter. An example of iambic pentameter would be line two, “And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul”. The line has ten syllables and five feet with an emphasis on every other syllable. Most lines have ten syllables and five to six lines in every stanza of the poem. Richard Wilbur liked to keep his form loose and did not maintain a strict structure. “‘The kind of poetry I like best, and try to write, uses the whole instrument,’ he says. ‘Meter, rhyme, musical expression—and everything is done for the sake of what’s being said, not for the sake of prettiness’”(Lambert, Craig). He believed that the content of the poem mattered more than the structure of the poem. While the format of the poem can be seen as an important creative choice by the author, the subject of the poem has the ability to grab the readers’ attention and emotionally affect the mind. On the surface of the poem, it seems that it’s just a bright and positive view of waking up in the morning, but underneath it is a journey of the soul.

Richard Wilbur wrote this poem with the theme of love. By analyzing the imagery that Wilbur painted, the reader can see that the optimistic poem underlines the acceptance of human flaws. The point of view he uses is that of the human soul. He uses his word choice to show that the soul wishes the world could be filled with simple chores, but it loves the more complex mistakes humans make anyway. The first stanza of the poem already separates the soul from the human body. In the first couple of lines, the reader is left to depend on his or her senses. Wilbur uses imagery like “cry of pulleys” to get the reader’s imagination working. He then uses words like “spirited”, “bodiless”, and “simple” to describe the rejuvenated soul that has just woken up from a restful sleep. Now he uses the word “dawn” because the soul is waking up, but he emphasizes on the importance of the word “false”. He uses “false” as a sort of comparison with the soul. Some people believe in spirits, but others would call them false assumptions. The dawn shown in the first stanza is one when only spirits have risen and the real world is still dreaming peacefully. In the next two lines, the reader can infer from the previously used word “pulleys” and the word “awash” that the neighbors are probably hanging their laundry up to dry

. Most people used to hang their laundry up to dry in the morning so that it could dry in the sun all day. This is a simple image, but is made more complex by the word “angles”. Angels tend to be imagined as wearing white and flying in the breeze. This imagery can be connected to clean laundry because when hung up it shines in the sun and flows in the wind like angels would. The simplistic view of a sunny morning continues in the second stanza when Wilbur elucidates on laundry. Wilbur uses the imagery of a morning breeze in the second stanza as a metaphor for the angels’ breathing. The different garments and bedding flow in the gusts of morning air to the point where it looks like they are breathing. This image gives off the feelings of peacefulness and bliss like how an angel would radiate “deep joy”, but the third stanza starts to emanate a more somber feeling. The breeze starts to pick up speed at the beginning of stanza three as seen in the metaphor of “staying like white water”. It shows that the angels, like water, are chained to a wire, or riverbed, but display constant and turbulent motion. The breeze breaks in lines fifteen and sixteen, so that “the soul shrinks”.

The soul found happiness in the visit from other spirits, but now the world has gone quiet and the soul is left alone. This is when the humans start to wake up and take on the day. It also means the soul entered the body again and feels the weight of the world, unlike when it was so energetic and buoyant in the first stanza when it was separated from the human body. The fourth stanza really starts to reveal the theme of the poem rather than just introduce an image to the reader. The first two lines of the stanza show that the soul remembers the time the humans wake up. The soul is deprived of living any other part of the day because of the punctuality of the humans’ morning wake-up routine in line nineteen. The soul wishes it could go back to simpler times when it was just admiring the laundry in lines twenty-one through twenty-three, but it is not given the opportunity. This stanza only shows half of the theme because the soul has only confessed its love for simple and bright mornings.

The theme of acceptance is made whole in the fifth stanza when negative issues are brought up. “A connoisseur of riddles, he loved constructing poems in which the meaning is not revealed until the end, like a well-delivered punchline”(Woo, Elaine). Wilbur exhibits his theme of acceptance by first clarifying in the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth lines that “…the sun acknowledges/ With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors”. He says this to reason with the reader that even the sun accepts everything it sees with warmth. He then goes on to say that the soul finally tolerates humankind even with its filthiness, crime, obesity, and secrets in the last few lines of the poem. Wilbur’s poem displays the theme of love through the soul’s acceptance of humankind’s many flaws. The soul finds happiness in simplicity, but it also finds room to love the complexity of the human mind. Richard Wilbur’s philosophy on optimism was not so much staying positive all the time, but knowing that everything would work out just fine.

Wilbur enjoyed sharing his observations on the natural world and love in his poetry. His simplistic and almost flowy style gained much critical acclaim in his lifetime and earned him many awards. This positive viewpoint can still be used in today’s society. Nowadays negativity and anxiety tend to plague social media and news outlets. Positivity can help people stay motivated and can even help with stress management. Optimism could be imperative to changing the mainstream negativity that seems to surround the modern world.