New and Collected Poems (Harvest Book)

Rating:
Summary: the man is really good
Review: it's no wonder wilbur was once the poet laureate or that this collection won the pulitzer, the man is good. he uses the language beautifully (the way english was meant to be in poetry), he has tight control of the rhyme, meter, subject, and words in his poems. where he really shines is in his translations. wilbur is one of the best translators living today.

Rating:
Summary: Beauty & Wit
Review: Richard Wilbur is undoubtedly the best poet of the last half of the 20th century. This book collects all his poetry other than Mayflies (published later) and a couple translations. Buy It!

Rating:
Summary: A dynamite collection from a formalist master
Review: This Pulitzer Prize-winning collection contains all of Wilbur (except his great translations of Moliere and Racine) in reverse chronological order of his books from 1989 to 1954. This is the opposite of most poetry collections, so it seems strange to have the poems get less confident as you read on. Still, the final poem, "The Beautiful Changes," is near-perfect and perfectly sums up Wilbur's paradoxical outlook: beauty is eternal and ever-changing.

Wilbur is old school. He is all about meter and rhyme and beauty. His command of sound and sense is second to none alive. (He has edited a collection of Poe's poetry and is famed for his accurate verse translations of Moliere's plays.)

As I read through this book, I put a star by every poem I liked. Flipping through it now, I see there is a star by almost every poem. I did not find Wilbur as deep or as challenging as Frost or Yeats, poets he is compared to by other reviewers on this site. I can, however, appreciate his mastery of the craft of formal poetry. This is not some bad pseudo-Shelley but really a poetry in the language of our time about the issues of our time.

If you detest rhyme, complex stanzas and short, potent lyrics, by all means avoid Mr. Wilbur. But if you find delight in the artful manipulation of language then you are depriving yourself of happiness in not reading this collection.