Pulitzer Winner Picked as U.S. Poet Laureate

Richard Wilbur, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and translator, was named Friday as poet laureate of the United States. He succeeds Robert Penn Warren.

“He is a poet for us all, whose elegant words brim with wit and paradox,” said Daniel J. Boorstin, the librarian of Congress, who appointed Wilbur.

“He is also a poet’s poet . . . a cosmopolitan citizen of the world of letters,” Boorstin said. “His poems are among the best our country has to offer.”

Wilbur, 66, was born in New York, reared in New Jersey and educated at Amherst College and Harvard University. He is the second poet laureate, a title created in 1985 as a successor to the post of consultant in poetry.

In a 1956 book, “Altitudes: Things of This World,” Wilbur wrote this paean to the Library of Congress, which is distinguished by a 160-foot-high dome:

Look up into the dome:

It is a great salon, a brilliant place,

Yet not too splendid for the race

Whom we imagine there, wholly at home.

Wilbur’s first book of poetry, “The Beautiful Changes,” was published in 1947. His third book, from which the poem about the Library of Congress was taken, won the Pulitzer and National Book awards.

He received the Bollingen prize for poetry in 1971 and has held Guggenheim and Ford Foundation fellowships. He was president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1974-1976.

In a 1976 collection, Wilbur wrote:

Happy the man who, journeying far and wide

As Jason or Ulysses did, can then

Turn homeward, seasoned in the ways of man

And claim his own, and there peace abide!

The new poet laureate is well known, too, as a critic and translator. He translated Moliere’s “Le Misanthrope” in 1952 and Moliere’s “Tartuffe” in 1963. Both were produced in New York. He was the lyricist for “Candide,” Leonard Bernstein’s musical version of Voltaire’s classic.

Wilbur will take over his new job, which pays $35,000 a year, in September. His duties are to advise the librarian of Congress on literary matters and collections, to do some speaking and to consult with others who may require literary advice.