Richard Wilbur
Richard Wilbur
Richard Purdy Wilburis an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth1 March 1921
CountryUnited States of America
morning honesty fall
There is a poignancy in all things clear, In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning. Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water We fall to imagining prodigious honesties.
sex headache knows
Most women know that sex isgood for headaches.
morning light boredom
We know what boredom is: it is a dull Impatience or a fierce velleity, A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude, To make or do. In the strict sense, of course, We invent nothing, merely bearing witness To what each morning brings again to light
nature art eye
The eye is pleased when nature stoops to art.
pride doors heaven
What is our praise or pride but to imagine excellence and try to make it? What does it say over the door of heaven; but, homo (sapiens) fecit?
talking self poetry
That's the main business of the poem!-to see if you can't make up a language that sets all your selves talking at once-all of them being fair to each other.
understood
What's lightly hid is deepest understood,
truth lying party
To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle, When in fact you haven't of late, can do no harm.
sleep blow journey
What you hope for Is that at some point of the pointless journey, Indoors or out, and when you least expect it, Right in the middle of your stride, like that, So neatly that you never feel a thing, The kind assassin Sleep will draw a bead And blow your brains out.
passion thinking shoes
Try to remember this: what you project Is what you will perceive; what you perceive With any passion, be it love or terror, May take on whims and powers of its own. Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection Will serve you best - unless you overdo it, Watching your step too narrowly, refusing To specify a world, shrinking your purview To a tight vision of your inching shoes, Which may, as soon as you come to think, be crossing An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle.
violence fancy tricks
It is not tricks of sense But the time's fright within me which distracts Least fancies into violence
summer rain heart
Caught Summer is always an imagined time. Time gave it, yes, but time out of any mind. There must be prime In the heart to beget that season, to reach past rain and find Riding the palest days Its perfect blaze.
soul casting like-you
Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.