Richard Wilbur
American Poet Laureate, literary scholar and translator who came to prominence in the Fifties
RICHARD WILBUR, who has died aged 96, was an urbane and learned poet whose work was admired for its elegance, thoughtfulness and technical virtuosity.
Although not America’s first Poet Laureate, Wilbur was its first fully functioning one, and when he took on the role, in 1987, he was able to advise the Library of Congress on its poetry archives, while also carrying out more ceremonial functions – greeting school parties, devising lecture series, and introducing guest poets. He was relieved that the job, unlike its British equivalent, did not require him to produce partisan poems, or, as his predecessor Robert Penn Warren had put it, to write “Get-well-quick cards to Ronald Reagan’s sick horse”.
Wilbur had made a name for himself not only as the pre-eminent American poet of the Fifties, but also as a scholar, with a special interest in the work of Edgar Allen Poe. His own poetry has been written off by some poets as unambitious, and John Reibetanz spoke for many when wondering how it was that a man who had taken part in military actions at Monte Cassino, Anzio, the invasion of southern France and the Battle of the Bulge could write so calmly.
In fact, some of his earlier poems show him responding to carnage in so resigned and understated a way that the result can be as shocking as more conventional war poetry. In “First Snow in Alsace”, he wrote: “You think: beyond the town a mile/or two, this snowfall fills the eyes/of soldiers dead a little while.”
He would regularly mix the modern world with his own romanticism. He once explained that he “got away with” using the word “firmament” as the last word of a love poem to his wife by setting it beside the homely image of “a good fiddle”. In some ways, the best uses to which he put his gifts were in translating, and writing words for music: he wrote the libretto for Bernstein’s musical, Candide. His versions of Molière, too, showed how well he could work to a tight brief, and, as with the Laureateship, put his poetry to the service of others.
Richard Purdey Wilbur was born on March 1 1921 in New York. His ancestors on his father’s side had arrived in America in 1632; his mother came from a distinguished line of journalists and his father made a living as a commercial artist.
The family moved from New York to New Jersey when he was two, and he grew up in the quiet isolation of a farm in North Caldwell. “You develop an ability to be alone without weeping,” he explained, “and that, of course, is essential if you’re going to be a writer.”
He attended Essex Fells Grammar School, where he founded the “Death Club”, an organisation whose sole purpose was to spook people into joining it. He went on to Montclaire High School, where he met Robert Frost, who had come to do a reading. The two would later become friends, and when Wilbur was teaching a course on Frost’s poetry at Harvard, Frost, who lived nearby, would hear about the young poet’s interpretations, and gently disagree with him afterwards.
Wilbur went on to study at Amherst, where he edited the student paper. It was the influence of his teachers there that led him to become an academic himself when he returned from the war. On his undergraduate holidays, he would hobo around the country, and managed to visit 46 states by riding on freight trains. Soon he would induce his friends to join him in an activity which, as he put it, showed “clear evidence of romanticism”.
In his second year, he met his future wife, Charlotte Hayes Ward. When America entered the war, he went back to New York to enlist in the Reserve Corps. Having taken a government correspondence course on codes, he expressed an interest in cryptography; but his hoboing and friendships marked him out as too much of a radical to be trusted. He later learnt that military intelligence officers were looking for people as ignorant of politics as possible. Nevertheless, he ended up at what he called a “camp for undesirables” in Pennsylvania, from where he was shipped to Naples.
There, he tried again to become a cryptographer, with more success, when a captain from the Signal Company of 36th Division, aware of his superiors’ reservations about Wilbur, said, “One of our cryptographers just went crazy. We need a cryptographer. We’ll take you in, but if we catch you overthrowing the government, out you go.” He wrote some of his earliest poems on a cryptography machine. The process had a big impact on his work, and helps explain why so many riddles and puzzles appear in his collections. Other experiences of the war that influenced his career were lying under the ground at Monte Cassino reading Poe, and working among Texan soldiers, whose linguistic playfulness meant that they would never curse in the same way twice.
After the war, the GI Bill enabled him to continue his studies, which he pursued at Harvard, where he became a member of the Society of Fellows. Here he began to publish his earliest poems. He described his debut as painless: a friend took a bundle of his work to a publisher, who accepted it. The resulting volume, The Beautiful Changes, appeared in 1947, and at the end of the year it earned a recommendation in the New York Times.
Wilbur listed his influences as TS Eliot, James Joyce (for his formal poetry rather than experimental prose), Hart Crane and Marianne Moore. The voices of Frost and Gerard Manley Hopkins are especially strong in the first collection; in later work, the more relaxed, suggestive tones of Wallace Stevens would become audible. Two subsequent books, Things of the World (1956) and New and Collected Poems (1988) won Pulitzer prizes.
He became the defining American poet of the Fifties, and did much to influence others in a string of teaching posts: he was associate professor of English at Wellesley College from 1955 until 1957, after which he settled at Wesleyan College; he was writer-in-residence at Smith College from 1977 until 1986. At Wesleyan he was able to offer support to Robert Bly, James Wright, James Dickey, and Richard Howard but was perhaps proudest of the work he did to bring the work of Joseph Brodsky to the English-speaking world.
A late volume, Mayflies, appeared in 2000. In the title poem he seemed to address the contradiction of being at once a poet, one supposed to have enlightening visions for humanity, and also being a public figure, a member of the intellectual establishment: “Watching these lifelong dancers of a day/as night closed in, I felt myself alone/in a life too much my own …”
Elsewhere, though, he could console himself by thinking: “You do exactly as you want to do, you’re as lonely and as happy as a child playing with his toy trains, and then it turns out that people are grateful to you…”
He married Charlotte Ward (known as Charlee) in 1947. She died in 2007 and he is survived by their daughter and three sons.