Richard Wilbur

We mourn the loss of Richard Wilbur, poet, gentle man, and Poe scholar. "Wilbur died on October 14, 2017, in Belmont, M.A., with his family by his side, according to friend and fellow poet, Dana Gioia" (Houston Chronicle, Associated Press). He is survived by his children Christopher, Ellen, Nathan, and Aaron, as well as three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

A World War II veteran, Richard Wilbur, or Dick, as he was called by friends and neighbors, was trained as a cryptographer by the U.S. Army, and according to his short bio at Modern American Poetry, "Youthful engagements with leftist causes caught the attention of federal investigators … and he was demoted to a front-line infantry position where he saw action in the field in Italy, France and Germany" He was educated at Amherst College and Harvard and taught at Wesleyan College, where he helped found the Wesleyan University Press Poetry Series. He was named the second Poet Laureate of the United States. His books of poetry include these and more: The Beautiful Changes (1947), Ceremony (1950), Things of This World (1956) (which won the Pulitzer Prize), Advice to a Prophet (1961), Walking to Sleep (1969) (which won the Bollingen Prize), The Mind-Reader (1976), New and Collected Poems (1987), Collected Poems, 1943–2004 (2004), and Anterooms: New Poems and Translations (2010).

Wilbur was a poet first, as he said many times in interviews, but he was also an educator and a translator. What distinguished Wilbur both as a man and as a poet was his commitment to the imaginary, to the "things of this world," and to the emotional. He had this to say about translation, for example: "I couldn't imagine beginning to translate anybody living or dead without at least having the illusion of some kind of personal understanding—some understanding of the range of his feelings beyond the particular work. … I have to like the poem pretty well in the first place. This keeps me, I think, from being a professional translator—doing things wholesale. I have to like the poem and feel it has something to do with my feelings—that I understand the feelings that went into it" ("A Talk about Translation," in The Catbird's Song, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1997, 179). One of the translated poems that most Poe scholars know is worth citing again: Wilbur's translation of Stéphane Mallarmé's "The Tomb of Edgar Poe."

Changed by eternity to Himself at last,The Poe, with the bare blade of his mind,Thrusts at a century which had not divinedDeath's victory in his voice, and is aghast.

Aroused like some vile hydra of the pastWhen an angel proffered pure words to mankind,Men swore that drunken squalor lay behindHis magic portions and the spells he cast.

The wars of earth and heaven—O endless grief!If we cannot sculpt from them as a bas-reliefTo ornament the dazzling tomb of Poe,

Calm block here fallen from some far disaster,Then let this boundary stone at least say noTo the dark flights of Blasphemy hereafter.

(Richard Wilbur, Anterooms: New Poems and Translations, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.)

Thanks to technology, we can hear Wilbur talk of Mallarmé and Poe on the Poetry Foundation website (see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/74683/richard-wilbur).

This obituary cannot do full justice to this poet who admired Poe, whose introduction to the Laurel Poetry Series book on Poe stands as a testament to Wilbur's admiration for Poe's contribution to letters. In Wilbur's words, "Poe offered always a supernal beauty which might restore the unity of the diffused universe—and of his own shattered soul—the poet begins with earthly things … subverts their identities and accomplishes their imaginative destruction. The supposition is that a melodious and rhythmic destruction of the earthly must be heavenly" (19). Wilbur, in turn, offered us a beauty in his poetry, a beauty that survives death and gives us "respite" from the world's turmoil. To reveal a personal choice, a respite, I end this obituary with a poem...