Richard Wilbur

 Thank you for this absolutely accurate summary of just who Richard Wilbur was. Allow me to add the following.We have lost the best American poet since Robert Frost, the best translator of French — well I cannot think of anyone comparable. To call him a virtuoso and his verse “polished” and “urbane” is to damn with faint praise. Maybe we should call Milton “sonorous” and Mallarmé “puzzling.”

Richard Wilbur was a true poet. He wrote verse, poems in strictly measured language with a command of rhyme rarely approached since Browning. His genius was contrary to the prevailing fashion. Well, that was true of Dickens once and true, for that matter, of J. S. Bach. I have heard too much of what fashion has to say, enough from those poets and critics who belittled Wilbur. The times, it seems, were out of step with his genius. But that will change. This man wrote poetry in its truest richest sense, its inner energy just contained within the strength of its form.

As for translations, well, I have read Wilbur’s translations of the great Molière, and there are not a few moments when the translation is better than the original. His wit is remarkable, best illustrated by his elegant and very funny OPPOSITES.

What’s the opposite of riot?
Lots of people keeping quiet.

He is gone, and I wonder just how completely he held on to the faith that emerges even in his last poems:

Dreams, which interweave
All our times and tenses, are
What we can believe: Dark they are, yet plain,
Coming to us now as if
Through a cobwebbed pane
Where, before our eyes,
All the living and the dead
Meet without surprise.

https://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2017/10/the-most-perfect-poet-in-the-english-language-richard-wilbur-is-dead-at-96/

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