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-
trait painter. When Wilbur was two years old,
the family moved into a pre-Revolutionary War
stone house in North Caldwell, New Jersey.
Although not far from New York City, he and
his brother, Lawrence, grew up in rural sur-
roundings, which, Wilbur later speculated, led
to his love of nature.
Wilbur showed an early interest in writing,
which he has attributedto his mother’s family
because her father was an editor of theBaltimore
Sunand her grandfather was both an editor and a
publisher of small papers aligned with the Demo-
cratic Party. At Montclair High School, from
which he graduated in 1938, Wilbur wrote editori-
als for the school newspaper. At Amherst College
he was editor of the campus newspaper, the
Amherst Student.Healsocontributedstoriesand
poems to the Amherst student magazine, the
Touchstone, and considered a career in journalism.
Immediately after his college graduation in
June 1942, Wilbur married Mary Charlotte
Hayes Ward of Boston, an alumna of Smith
College. Having joined the Enlisted Reserve
Corps in 1942, he went on active duty in the
army in 1943 in the midst of World War II. He
served with the Thirty-sixth ‘‘Texas’’ Division in
Italy at Monte Cassino and Anzio and then in
Germany along the Siegfried Line. It was during
the war that he began writing poems, intending,
as he said in a 1964 interview withThe Amherst
Literary Magazine(borrowing Robert Frost’s
phrase), ‘‘a momentary stay against confusion’’
in a time of world disorder. When the war ended
he found himself with a drawer full of poems,
only one of which had been published.
Wilbur went to Harvard for graduate work
in English to become a college teacher. As he
recalled in his 1964 Amherst interview Wilbur
decided to submit additional poems for publica-
tion only after a French friend read his manu-
scripts, ‘‘kissed me on both cheeks and said,
’you’re a poet.’’’ In 1947, the year he received
his A.M. from Harvard, his first volume of
poems, The Beautiful Changes and Other
Poems, was published.
The Beautiful Changescontains the largest
number of poems (forty-two) and the fewest
number of translations (three) of any of his col-
lections. Although he began writing his poetry to
relieve boredom while he was in the army, there
are actually only seven war poems; and they are
more poetic exercises on how to face the prob-
lems of disorder and destruction than laments
over the losses occasioned by war, as in the
traditions of the World War I British poet
Wilfred Owen and the World War II American
poet Randall Jarrell.
The first of Wilbur’s war poems, ‘‘Tywater,’’
presents the paradox of the violence illustrated
in a Texas corporal’s skill in killing the enemy
[....] The compassion of Jarrell’s war poetry is
clearly missing. Instead, there is an ironic
detachment somewhat like John Crowe Ran-
som’s but without the meticulous characteriza-
tion that distinguishes Ransom’s best poems:
[....]
Another war poem, ‘‘First Snow in Alsace,’’
suggests the theme implied by the title of the
volume,The Beautiful Changes. The beautiful
can change man even in times of duress. War is
horrible because man permits it in spite of such
simple childlike pleasures as a night sentry on
being ‘‘the first to see the snow.’’ ‘‘On the Eyes
of an SS Officer’’ is a poetic exercise on the
extremes of fanaticism. Wilbur compares the
explorer Roald Amundsen, a victim of the north-
ern ice that he desired to conquer, and a ‘‘Bombay
saint,’’ blinded by staring at the southern sun,
with an SS officer, a villain of the Holocaust.
The SS officer in his fanaticism combines what
is evident in the eyes of the first two fanatics, ice
and fire, for his eyes are ‘‘iced or ashen.’’ The
persona stays detached and does not explicitly
condemn this terrible kind of fanaticism. The
poem ends a bit tamely[....]
If there is a prevailing theme in Wilbur’s first
volume, it is how the power of the beautiful to
change can be used as a buttress against disor-
der. The initial poem, ‘‘Cicadas,’’ suggests the
necessity for and the beauty of mystery in nature.
The song of thecigales(better known as the
cicada) can change those who hear it, but the
reason for the song is beyond the scientist’s ana-
lytical abilities to explain. It is spontaneous, gra-
tuitous, and consequently a mystery to be
appreciated as an aesthetic experience and
described by a poet in a spirit of celebration.
‘‘Water Walker’’ postulates an analogy
between man and the caddis flies, or ‘‘water
walkers,’’ which can live successfully in two ele-
ments, air and water. A human equivalent would
be the two lives of Saint Paul, described asLove Calls Us to the Things of This World