Richard Wilbur, an American poet and translator whose precise, rhythmic verse — employing classical forms in an era when experimental works and free-flowing confessionals reigned supreme — earned him two Pulitzer Prizes and a reputation as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, died Oct. 14, at a nursing home in Belmont, Mass. He was 96.
The cause was not immediately known, said a son, Chris Wilbur.
Wilbur, a former Army infantryman who devoted himself to poetry after returning from World War II, was among the most prolific poets of his generation. A devotee of classical rhyme and meter, his work retained a sense of orderly elegance through the rise of confessional poets such as Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, and in contrast to the often esoteric work of avant-garde writers like John Ashbery, who died last month at age 90.
“If Ashbery invented a whole new kind of poetry,” said Robert Casper, head of the Library of Congress’ Poetry and Literature Center, “Richard Wilbur reminded us of the enduring power of tradition: that poems about the natural world and about love, written in classical, traditional rhyme and meter, would continue to matter going forward into the future.”
In an email, the Irish poet Paul Muldoon described Wilbur as “the single greatest technician in American poetry of the last 70 years,” adding: “It was a technique perfectly at the service of tenderness and terror.”
Wilbur published his first book, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, in 1947, rendering his war experiences in a formal style that some critics derided as overly ornate and borderline baroque.
Within a decade, however, he had refined his voice, stripping away some of its poetic excesses. He won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for Things of This World, which drew its title from one of Wilbur’s most widely anthologized poems.
The poem, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, began with a heavenly vision inspired in part by the Confessions of St. Augustine:
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
It was one of many poems that demonstrated Wilbur’s deep-rooted belief that the universe was, as he put it in an interview with the Paris Review, “full of glorious energy . . . and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good.”
“My feeling,” he continued, “is that when you discover order and goodness in the world, it is not something you are imposing — it is something that is likely really to be there, whatever crumminess and evil and disorder there may also be. I don’t take disorder or meaninglessness to be the basic character of things.”
In a sign of Wilbur’s stature, he was appointed the second U.S. poet laureate, following Robert Penn Warren, in 1987. (The Library of Congress had previously named consultants in poetry.) Two years later, he received his second Pulitzer Prize, for New and Collected Poems.