Glimpses: Richard Wilbur on inspiration

Richard Wilbur in his study

Poet Richard Wilbur's auspicious 1947 debut, The Beautiful Changes, earned the admiration of two of the most enduring American poets of the era, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens.  

Since then, Wilbur has received nearly every award and honor available to an American poet, including two Pulitzers, two Bollingen Prizes, a National Book Award, and the office of the U.S. Poet Laureate. 

In an interview with Littorial, he talks about his muse.

"It is good to have something honorable to toil at when you've not been visited by an inspiration. As embarrassing as that word is– "inspiration"– I do think it corresponds to my experience. A poem comes looking for me rather than I hunting after it.


"It just happens when I'm walking about. I just go about my business. Of course some of the time I'm reading other people, and the impulse can come of reading a good poem of Robert Frost's and thinking "I wish I could do something like that." Every poet, I think, has some other poets in his experience who are, as John Holmes used to call it, their "starters." Holmes said when he read Robert Graves it made him want to write his own poems. I think I feel that way for example about Elizabeth Bishop. Reading her makes me want to have the great pleasure of writing a poem.

"I know that in some of my poems I'm a continuator of Robert Frost, and I hope that I belong somewhere in the same ballpark. I think that poets who are worth a damn are in communion, as it were, with a great part of the poetry that's been written in our language and in others."