Richard Wilbur Selected as 2nd U.S. Poet Laureate

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Wilbur will be the nation’s second poet laureate, succeeding Robert Penn Warren, the Library of Congress announced today.

Wilbur, professor emeritus at Smith College in Massachusetts, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1956 for his third book of poetry, “Things of This World.” In 1971, he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry.

In announcing Wilbur’s appointment, librarian Daniel Boorstin described Wilbur as “a poet for us all, whose elegant words brim with wit and paradox. He is also a poet’s poet, at home in the long tradition and traveled ways of the great poets of our language. . . . His poems are among the best our country has to offer.”

The position Wilbur assumes early this fall carries the dual title of poet laureate and consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress.

Previous consultants have included Robert Frost, Stephen Spender, James Dickey and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Wilbur, 66, is widely known for his translations of the French playwright Moliere’s “Le Misanthrope” and “Tartuffe,” winning the 1963 Bollingen Prize for translation for the latter.