Richard Wilbur Keynote Speaker

Richard Wilbur has received many awards in his career. Most notable are the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2006, two National Book Awards, and the Bollingen Translation Prize. He has also served as the Poet Laureate of the United States and is the only living American poet to have won the Pulitzer Prize twice, first for his third book of poetry, Things of This World (1956) and also for New and Collected Poems (1989.)

Born in 1921 in New York City, Wilbur grew up in North Caldwell, New Jersey after his family moved there in 1923. He later attended Amherst College where he majored in English.  While in college, he met Charlotte “Charlee” Ward at Amherst’s “sister school,” Smith College, and they married in 1942. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Wilbur attended Harvard Graduate School and received his Master’s Degree in 1947. He remained as a Junior Fellow and then joined the Harvard faculty in 1950.  Just after his graduation at the age of 26, he published his first book, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems. It received exceptional reviews and critics praised Wilbur as a gifted writer of the “war generation.” Along with his award winning poetry, Wilbur also spent forty years translating Molière’s major comedies, which have been staged across the country. Wilbur currently resides in Cummington, Massachusetts and Key West, Florida.

For C.
by Richard Wilbur

After the clash of elevator gates
And the long sinking, she emerges where,
A slight thing in the morning’s crosstown glare,
She looks up toward the window where he waits,
Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest
Of the huge traffic bound forever west.

On such grand scale do lovers say good-bye—
Even this other pair whose high romance
Had only the duration of a dance,
And who, now taking leave with stricken eye,
See each in each a whole new life forgone.
For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn,

Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these
Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief
And baggage, yet with something like relief,
It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas
To cancel out their crossing, and unmake
The amorous rough and tumble of their wake.

We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse
And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share
The frequent vistas of their large despair,
Where love and all are swept to nothingness;
Still, there’s a certain scope in that long love
Which constant spirits are the keepers of,

And which, though taken to be tame and staid,
Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,
A passion joined to courtesy and art
Which has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament.