It’s the birthday of poet Richard Wilbur (1921-2017, #nicelonglife), who throughout his illustrious career was praised for his technical virtuosity and courtly style but was also at times criticized for his technical virtuosity and courtly style. So if you liked Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, you maybe didn’t like Richard Wilbur.

Wilbur was born in New York, New York, but grew up on a farm in North Caldwell, New Jersey, with one younger brother, Steeped in Nature as befits a future poet. Wilbur studied at Amherst College, where he met and married Charlotte Ward, who was to be his lifelong love. (They had four children.) Wilbur was opposed to U.S. involvement in WWII at first but enlisted after Pearl Harbor, serving as a cryptographer with a unit in Europe. (I would tell you what a cryptographer does but I’m not supposed to say.)

Wilbur went to grad school at Harvard after the war and got serious about poetry, publishing his first collection, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, in 1947. (Actually, Wilbur’s first publication was what he called “a horrible little poem about nightingales” written when he was eight years old and for which he was paid one dollar by John Martin’s Magazine.) Then came Ceremony, and Other Poems (1950), a Bestiary (1955), and Things of This World: Poems (1956), which won the 1957 Pulitzer for poetry. He produced several more collections and in 1989 won a second Pulitzer, like you do, for New and Collected Poems (1988), by which point he was also serving as the second poet laureate of the U.S. He also translated, brilliantly, several plays by Molière. But throughout his career, he periodically took criticism for being overly controlled and underly passionate—including a comment famously made by Randall Jarrell that Wilbur “never goes too far, but he never goes far enough.”

Wilbur’s poem “Because he swings so neatly through the trees,” reads in its entirety:

Because he swings so neatly through the trees,

An ape feels natural in the word trapeze.

 

And his poem “A Barred Owl” begins:

The warping night air having brought the boom

Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,

We tell the wakened child that all she heard

Was an odd question from a forest bird,

Asking of us, if rightly listened to,

“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

(Read the the whole thing here.)

Wilbur died at 96 at a nursing home in Belmont, Massachusetts, having written 60 years’ worth of poetry that revealed “a deep trust in a God who sustains and informs our world” (“Remembering Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), Part I,” Paul Mariani, imagejournal.org, Oct. 31, 2017).

Have a splendid sun-sparkling-off-snow sort of Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.