Richard Wilbur was an American poet. He published eight collections of original poetry and translations, including The Beautiful Changes (1947), Things of This World (1956), and Advice to a Prophet (1961), alongside collections of his work, extended translations of the French playwright Molière, and children's books. He is known primarily for his formal accomplishments––that is, for the delicate balance he effects between rhyme, meter, line, and phrase, according to inherited traditions in English-language poetry and others of Wilbur's own devising. He was also noted for his subtlety as a writer, his ability to say things such that their intimations, over time, reverberated beyond the apparent simplicity or beauty of their formulation. In his lifetime he was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, a Frost Medal, the Bollingen Prize (twice), and a Prix de Rome, among other laurels.
"Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" was published in Richard Wilbur's 1956 collection Things of This World, and part of its title forms the title of that volume. It has been, as critics have noted, much anthologized—that is, included in...
Richard Wilbur was a poet whose works were elegant yet witty and paradoxical. He was the second poet laureate of the United States, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Things of This World: Poems in 1957, and then won another Pulitzer...
