Monday, October 16, 2017

SIC TRANSIT

Richard Wilbur, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and one of the "Amherst Poets," died on Saturday at the age of ninety-six.  On New Year's Eve, 1954, I danced with his wife.

2 comments:

  1. In the summer of 1971, as a young teenager, I heard Wilbur give an informal reading at a music camp in the Berkshires (in the little town where he lived). I never danced with his wife, though, so you win this little contest of recollections. ;)

    As the Wa Po obit pointed out, he was not a confessional poet à la Lowell or Plath but a master at working within the formal constraints of meter and rhyme (though not everything he wrote was in rhyme), and also a celebrated translator of Molière and Racine, among others.

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