Collected Poems 1943–2004

Collected Poems 1943–2004

“It is a consolation to read through sixty years of Richard Wilbur’s poetry. He should be read in the company of … Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens.” – Harold Bloom

Reviews of Collected Poems 1943–2004

Times Literary Supplement, September 22nd 2006
"The poetry of Richard Wilbur has been famous for over half a century, both for epitomizing a kind of craftsmanship which might be called European – like the work of a similarly notable contemporary, the late Anthony Hecht – and for a view of life and the world which is neither as thoroughly pessimistic nor as insistent as the one the times have seemed to commend to many American poets … [M]ore than any other contemporary poet, [Wilbur] is able to demonstrate the power of happiness to write something other than white, able to affirm ‘Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows’ and, at the same time, and for the same ultimate purpose, to demonstrate that a rich and elaborate technique amounts to more than a set of decorous historical impedimenta … It would be a poor canon which did not include a generous sample from Wilbur’s body of work … – Sean O’Brien

PN Review, July-August 2006
"In a career spanning more than sixty years, Richard Wilbur has devoted himself to organising the daylight and exploring the darkness. A musical, formal and cultured poet, his latest Collected is a continuing triumph. At 85 he has outlived most of his peers. Yet he is still producing those elegantly constructed, metrical investigations into our lives … Wilbur is a poet of rare talent. He is an important American poet, and The Waywiser Press has done a great good in producing what must substantially be a life’s work. At £14.99 it would be a hard reader who did not feel more than amply rewarded." – Tony Roberts

The Guardian, March 25th 2006
"For 60 years Richard Wilbur has remained in the front rank of contemporary poets, always present, patiently defying trends, a lucid thinker whose poems stick in the mind and whose virtuosity never ceases to astonish and gratify his readers. While the earlier poems – those of the late 40s to the 60s – probably represent his best work, this capacious and inclusive volume is welcome, pulling into print his major collections, some of his remarkable translations and his delightful verses for children … [Wilbur’s] career, in its sweep and steadiness, its dedication to classical principles, reminds us that fashions will come and go, in poetry as in all things, but that the artist must pursue clarity of vision, asking only for grace. [He] has never wavered as an artist, and there is grace enough for any reader in this varied, boundless volume." – Jay Parini

To read the whole of this review, please click the link:"The Poet as Heliotrope"

Acumen
"Richard Wilbur’s Collected Poems 1943-2004 is an essential collection, the gathered work of one of America’s greatest poets … [T]his splendid collection ought to lead to a reconsideration of his achievement." – Glyn Pursglove

Poetry Review
"Besides the Richard Wilbur that all serious American, and many British, readers know, there are at least four others no one talks about. The familiar Wilbur presents a technically flawless paradigm of dignified, mostly stanzaic, mostly rhyming verse, much of it devoted to beautiful forests, statuary, easel paintings, married love and parenthood, a paradigm to which young poets disenchanted with recent styles resort: this Wilbur detects ‘a poignancy in all things clear’, likens poets to architects and jugglers, and advises that ‘a heaven is easier made of nothing at all / Than the earth regained’. This Wilbur is real, valuable, and at least as talented as his acolytes suggest. But there are others, all valuable in themselves. This hefty Collected (his third overall, his first since 1987, and the first to include his verse for children) offers the juggler-architect along with: a shocked (even shell-shocked) American soldier; a fiercely partisan political liberal; a versatile translator; and a thoughtful, almost Hardyesque singer of subdued grief." – Stephen Burt

Washington Post
“Throughout his career Wilbur has shown, within the compass of his classicism, enviable variety. His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection. Besides, they are so beautiful one simply wants to go back to them again and again.” – Michael Dirda

New Yorker
“No other twentieth-century American poet, with the possible exception of James Merrill, demonstrates such a Mozartean felicity in the writing of verse … “ – Adam Kirsch

Slate
“Richard Wilbur …. is the author of half a dozen of the most perfectly made poems of the twentieth century, poems whose quiet elegance is unexcelled by even the most illustrious names American poetry can offer … His achievement is permanent.” – James Longenbach