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Richard Wilbur: The Killer-Diller Line |
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According to Salinger, Richard Wilbur is known for having the “killer-diller line” (Padgett, 149) because he almost always finishes his poems with a line that causes the poem to reach a crescendo. Wilbur’s poems are about many things, but the main inspiration behind his poems is his life. He writes about his early childhood, which was spent on a rural farm. He also writes about his life as a soldier in WWII. Wilbur even writes about how he traveled across the country, hitching rides, during the great depression. Wilbur’s poetry was greatly influenced by personal friends Robert Frost and F. O. Matthiessen. Wilbur combines the use of meter and rhyme with complex yet understandable paradoxes. Babette Duetsch once commented, “Here is poetry to be read with the eye, the ear, the heart and the mind” (Padgett, 150). Wilbur also writes verse drama, and is known for creating a rhymed, English version of the French classic, the Misanthrope, by Moličre. Wilbur was born in New York City on March 1st, 1921. In 1923, his family moved to a rural farm in North Caldwell, New Jersey. Living in a rural area, there were not many kids his age to play with, so he and his brother constantly walked around the farm and the surrounding countryside. Wilbur’s family, although British American, had deep roots in America. His first descendants to step foot on American soil were the original settlers of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. While growing up, Wilbur’s parents taught him artistic values mixed with middle-class upbringing. As a child, Wilbur dreamed of growing up to become a comic book writer. In 1938, Wilbur was accepted into Amherst College. There he majored in English. Wilbur was a politic radical while attending college. After he graduated college, he married Charlotte Ward. One year later, when the U.S. entered WWII, he enlisted to be a cryptographer. Wilbur studied briefly at a military installation in Virginia, but was soon transferred to the infantry when a security check found he had leftist views and radical friends. Wilbur witnessed the end of the war in Italy, where his unit battled the fortified Siegfried line. After the end of the war, Wilbur went back to study at Harvard. There, he met F. O. Matthiessen and Robert Frost. Frost was interested in Wilbur’s wife because of her maiden name. Frost later found out that her father was the first person to publish Frosts works. He became famous when his wife showed one of his war poems to a friend who worked at the Saturday Evening Post, who then published it. Soon, his works became famous, and even critics could not help but applaud his style and themes. Wilbur now wrights poetry as well as some small plays, and has only one flaw. His poems are too short. One critic says, “Mr. Wilbur never goes too far, but he never goes far enough” (Padgett, 151). Wilbur was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, one for New and Collected Poems (1988) and one for Things of This World (1956), which also won the National Book award. He has also earned the Wallace Stevens Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Frost Medal, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bollingen Prize, the T. S. Eliot Award, a Ford Foundation Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, the National Arts Club medal of honor for literature, two PEN translation awards, the Prix de Rome Fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Award.
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List of Published Works: The Beautiful Changes (1947) Ceremony (1950) The Misanthrope (1955 Translated Version) Things of This World (1956) Candide (1957 Musical Version) Advice to a Prophet (1961) Tartuffe (1963 Translated Version) The School for Wives (1972 Translated Version) Opposites (1973) Responses (1976) The Mind Reader (1976) New and Collected Poems (1988) The Catbird's Song (1997) Mayflies (2000) |
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