Poetry for Students, Volume 29

is characterized negatively as ‘‘the punctual rape of every blessed day’’: the implication is that the` day would be much better ...

laundry is just not that important in most peo- ple’s lives. On the other hand, the use of laundry can be telling about the dich ...

some of the nun’s dignity, judging her to be too honored for her spiritualism. Although Wilbur does emphasize the nun’s physical ...

Cowley, Richard Crashaw, and Andrew Marvell, concerned themselves with understanding reality, and in particular how ideas manife ...

forces at play during the 1950s steered religious practice toward collective thinking and away from individualism. One of the mo ...

easy, spontaneous air...The poem marks an important development in Wilbur’s relationship with words, for here he succeeds as nev ...

poem being strictly regulated off track. In the same way, the lines do not seem as if they are mostly written in the ten-syllabl ...

even begin to touch upon what all of this action means until the second half. The second half of the poem can be read as two dif ...

forth: instead, they represent the refinement of his ideas. Source:David Kelly, Critical Essay on ‘‘Love Calls Us to the Things ...

Richard Purdy Wilbur was born in New York City, one of two children of Lawrence L. and Helen Purdy Wilbur. His father was a por- ...

‘‘Paulsaul.’’ He serves as an example of a ‘‘water walker,’’ a person who was converted from serv- ice in the material world to ...

silently awaits his death with his ‘‘wide and anti- que eyes’’ observing this world that has cost him his heart’s blood. His ant ...

to America his translation, The Misanthrope (1955), was published and performed at the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusett ...

compares the potentials of his discoveries in the floor with those of a great archeologist:[....] In ‘‘A Grasshopper’’ Wilbur ad ...

different stages in life. What keeps man running? Itishuman aspiration: [....] ‘‘Running’’ is by Wilbur’s own admission one of h ...

Whereas Lowell, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snod- grass, Plath, and even James Dickey have told much about their families, until The Mind ...

play and raises uncomfortable questions about the self and the world. Despite Wilbur’s achievement as a poet and his many awards ...

as Trilling did Frost but rather reckons him ‘‘a serious artist for an anxious century.’’ He iden- tifies in many of the poems n ...

on the same washline, so to speak, a colorfully promiscuous variety of loves—material, erotic, charitable, and sacred. Within th ...

poem marks a transition point: the soul shrinks back from the actual world and desires to remain in its spiritual world of clean ...