Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur (1921- ) is a prolific poet, translator, and teacher, having held professorships at Harvard, Wellesley, and Smith in a teaching career that began in 1947 and lasted until 1986. He is the former president and chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has won the National Book Award, the PEN Translation Prize, and two Pulitzer Prizes. He served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1987-88.

Wilbur began composing poems in World War II, while serving in Italy and Germany with the 36^th "Texas" Division. He wrote poetry, he later said, to create "a momentary stay against confusion" of the war. His first book of poetry, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, was published by Reynal and Hitchcock in 1947, the year Wilbur received his A.M. from Harvard. Wilbur has subsequently published 15 books of poetry, the most recent being Mayflies: New Poems and Translations (Harcourt, 2000). Almost all of his books of poems include a number of his translations of other poets.

Beginning with The Misanthrope, Richard Wilbur has become one of the English language's major translators of French classical drama. Inspired by having seen a 1948 production of Le Misanthrope by the Comédie Française, Wilbur attempted to write a full-length poetic drama of his own. In an interview with Edwin Honig, Wilbur remembered his try at composing modern verse drama in New Mexico in the early 1950s and that he "had no luck":

Since the 1955 publication of Wilbur's verse translation of The Misanthrope, he has translated Racine's Phaedra and Andromache and six other plays by Molière: Tartuffe, The School for Wives, The Learned Ladies, The School for Husbands, The Imaginary Cuckold, or , Sganarelle, and Amphitryon. All of his translations have received professional production.

In 1957, Wilbur wrote the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein's music and Lillian Hellman's book for the musical Candide.