Author Biography
Richard Wilbur was born in New York City on
March 1, 1921. His father was a commercial
portrait artist and his mother came from a line
of newspaper publishers, which led him, when he
was in his teens, toward a career in newspaper
cartooning. When he was very young, the family
moved to a remote, rural area of New Jersey,
where Wilbur spent his childhood wandering the
countryside. After high school, he went off to
Amherst College in Massachusetts, majoring in
English. In college, he met Charlotte Ward, who
was attending nearby Smith, and they fell in
love. They were married in 1942 after he grad-
uated, but very soon after that he was drafted to
serve in World War II.
After the end of the war, Wilbur took advant-
age of the G. I. Bill, which paid college tuition for
veterans, and attended Harvard University. As a
scholar in English, he met the poet Robert Frost
and, despite nearly a fifty-year difference in their
ages, the two became close friends after Frost
discovered that Wilbur’s wife was the grand-
daughter of the first publisher to print his poetry.
Though he had been writing poetry for some
time, Wilbur started to consider publishing his
works. He gave a few poems to a friend who
was an editor, and the friend returned a few
hours later with a proposal for a book. In Sep-
tember of 1947, Wilbur’s first poetry collection,
The Beautiful Changes, was published. Wilbur
was only twenty-seven years old at the time.
Wilbur’s next book of poetry,Ceremony
And Other Poems, was published to critical
acclaim in 1950. It was followed in 1956 by
Things of This World: Poems(which includes
‘‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This World’’);
this collection won the Pulitzer Prize and the
National Book Award. With his reputation as
one of America’s most important poets estab-
lished, Wilbur took a position at Wesleyan Uni-
versity in Middletown, Connecticut, where he
was to teach for the next twenty years.
In addition to his fame as a poet, Wilbur has
proven to be one of the great translators of
drama into the English language. His translation
of French playwright Moliere’sThe Misan- thrope, published in 1953, set standards for the use of poetic sensibilities in translation. Wilbur went on to publish translations of all of Moliere’s comedies, to great acclaim.
Wilbur retired from teaching in 1986. He
served as the Poet Laureate of the United States
from 1987–1988, and won a second Pulitzer Prize
in 1989 forNew and Collected Poems,making
him the only poet to ever win that award twice.
Over the course of his life he has won most of the
important prizes given to poets, including the
Wallace Stevens Award, the Frost Medal, the
Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Acad-
emy of Arts and Letters, two PEN translation
awards, two Bollingen Prizes, the T. S. Eliot
Award, a Ford Foundation Award, the Edna
St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the Harriet
Monroe Poetry Award, the Prix de Rome Fel-
lowship, and the Shelley Memorial Award.Poem Text
Stanza 1
The first stanza of ‘‘Love Calls Us to the Things of
This World’’ introduces readers to the poem’sRichard Wilbur(Nancy Palmieri / AP Images)Love Calls Us to the Things of This World