Richard Wilbur
Richard Wilbur
Richard Purdy Wilburis an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth1 March 1921
CountryUnited States of America
understood
What's lightly hid is deepest understood,
context dead died family funeral glad minister needs people
That's what (Hill) died for, the right for people to protest. But I don't think a funeral is the right place or context in the way they are protesting. It's not something the family needs to hear, that we're glad your son's dead and that your minister is a whore.
american-poet congress himself peculiar poet speaks
To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men.
ashes deeper dog found incomplete lay people rise slept
The little dog lay curled and did not rise But slept the deeper as the ashes rose, And found the people incomplete
rain rivers water
Happy in all that ragged, loose collapse of water, the fountain, its effortless descent and flatteries of spray...
ocean shore touched
All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know
mind steps crafts
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.
writing self talking
Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.
beautiful self hands
Your hands hold roses always in a way that says They are not only yours; the beautiful changes In such kind ways, Wishing ever to sunder Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
composition
Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.
soul casting like-you
Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.
truth lying party
To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle, When in fact you haven't of late, can do no harm.
odd
Odd that a thing is most itself when likened
men thinking sea
Columbus and his men, they say, Conveyed the virus hither Whereby my features rot away And vital powers wither; Yet had they not traversed the seas And come infected back, Why, think of all the luxuries That modern life would lack.