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Biography Richard Wilbur

U.S. Poet Laureate, 1987-1988

Richard Wilbur
Richard Wilbur, U.S. Poet Laureate, 1987-1988. Photo credit: Stathis Orphanos.

Richard Wilbur was born in New York City in 1921. He was the author of 14 poetry collections, including Things of This World (1956), which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award; and New and Collected Poems (1988), for which Wilbur received a second Pulitzer Prize. In addition to his poetry, Wilbur also published several children’s books and multiple translations of French plays by Moliere, Jean Racine, and Pierre Corneille. Wilbur’s honors included two fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Frost Medal, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation. He served as the 2nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1987-88, and from 1961-1995 served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. While a professor at Wesleyan University, he helped found the Wesleyan University Press poetry series in 1959. Richard Wilbur died in 2017.

Audio Recordings of Richard Wilbur

Selected Works at the Library of Congress