New and Collected Poems
by Richard Wilbur
Summary
New and Collected Poems brings together four decades of Richard Wilbur's work, from his earliest published poems through new material written in the 1980s, along with a selection of his verse translations, mostly from French drama. The book displays the full range Wilbur worked in throughout his career: occasional poems written for specific events, translations of Molière and Racine rendered in the same exacting rhymed verse he used in his own work, and meditations built out of ordinary objects, laundry on a line, a fountain, the quiet disorder of a writer's own workroom, each turned, without strain, into an occasion for genuine metaphysical reflection.
Wilbur writes almost entirely in rhyme and meter at a point in American poetry when free verse had become the dominant mode, and the book makes an implicit case that formal control and wit are not incompatible with real feeling. His lines move with a conversational ease that can make the strict rhyme scheme underneath almost invisible, a technical achievement that lets the poems' actual subjects, grace under ordinary pressure, the world's persistent beauty, come through without the form ever calling attention to itself.
Reading New and Collected Poems means encountering a poet often described as the heir to Robert Frost, working in a tradition of clarity, wit, and formal discipline that had, by the late 1980s, become almost countercultural in itself. It suits a reader who wants proof that rhymed, metered poetry can still feel alive and contemporary, and it rewards attention to how much technical control sits underneath poems that, on a first read, can seem almost effortlessly light.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Richard Wilbur the 1989 Prize for Poetry for New and Collected Poems, his second Pulitzer after Things of This World won in 1957, over finalists Donald Hall's The One Day and Garrett Hongo's The River of Heaven. The three decades separating his two Pulitzers had seen American poetry move decisively toward free verse and confessional subject matter, making Wilbur's continued commitment to rhyme and meter increasingly unusual among prize winning work rather than the default it had been in 1957.
In 1987 Wilbur became the second poet, after Robert Penn Warren, to hold the title of United States Poet Laureate following its renaming from Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He taught for decades at Wellesley, Wesleyan, Smith, and Amherst, mentoring a generation of poets associated with New Formalism, a movement that took Wilbur's own career as evidence that traditional form still had a future. He died in 2017 at ninety six.