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
thinking order suffering
I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry.
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
ocean shore touched
All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know
writing self talking
Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.
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?
self mind doe
It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.
break-up i-miss-you broken-heart
What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.
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.
odd
Odd that a thing is most itself when likened