An accomplished poet, yes, but not a tortured one

Poetry is not literally in the air as you drive through the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains, but as the temperature cools and your cellphone loses its signal, a certain space does open up in your mind, a swell of rhythms from an older and calmer time.

Cummington, a small town once home to 19th century poet William Cullen Bryant, is the primary residence of one of today’s most celebrated poets and translators, Richard Wilbur. The 85-year-old is a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate, often cited as an heir to Robert Frost and other New England writers.

All artists should live so well. Wilbur shares a modern, split-level house with his wife, Charlee, on about 80 acres that include walking paths ideal for a thinking man, and a tennis court and swimming pool for exercise. A neighboring dairy farm reminds him of his rural childhood.

Sixty years after his first book was published, Wilbur is a fixture in anthologies and commonly cited as among the greatest poets of his time. He will “inevitably” have a volume of his own released by the Library of America, publisher Max Rudin says, although no date has been set.

Wilbur is regarded, not always to his liking, as a leading “formalist” -- “formal” can be found near “formaldehyde” in the dictionary, he jokes -- a master of traditional, tempered verse that can seem old-fashioned in more radical times. “Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range / the long numbers that rocket the mind,” he once wrote. He is not a Romantic given to epics or wind-swept odes, but a man of care and reason who addresses his readers as fellow civilized beings.

“He’s one of the few writers I’ve ever known who has a balanced center of gravity,” says a fellow New England poet, Jay Parini of Middlebury, Vt. “He speaks with clarity, but also with wit and subtlety. And there’s not an ounce of pretense about him, in person or in his writing.”

Besides his poetry, Wilbur has written children’s verse, collaborated on the libretto to Leonard Bernstein’s production of “Candide” and established himself as a leading translator of French playwrights, notably Moliere, whose satirical couplets have served as an ideal template for Wilbur’s wordplay and wit.

He looks much younger than his age, with his clear voice, muscular torso and thick dark hair, and remains busy writing and translating. He recently published a poem, “Thistle,” in the New Yorker, and completed an English edition of Pierre Corneille’s “The Theater of Illusion,” scheduled to be published in April. Wilbur also participated in the National Endowment of the Arts’ “Operation Home Coming,” the anthology of stories from veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

“We interviewed him for the project and he offered a wonderful memory of trying to write a poem in a foxhole,” says NEA chairman and fellow poet Dana Gioia. “One does not think of Wilbur as a war poet, but he served in some of the bloodiest battles of World War II.”

Poets are supposedly isolated souls, but on the walls of Wilbur’s writing studio hang pictures of President Clinton (“a literate pol”), Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (“a bright Wellesley girl”) and Dylan Thomas (“good fun, although I suppose he was on his way to destroying himself”). Wilbur also knew a subdued Smith College student named Sylvia Plath, remembered in his poem “Cottage Street 1953” as “the pale, slumped daughter” of her “frightened” mother.

Wilbur himself does not pretend to identify with Plath, Thomas or any other tortured artist; neither war nor old age has shaken his essentially benign view of the world, one sustained by family life and his Christian faith in the afterlife.

“I think many people associate happiness with shallowness,” he says. “What people don’t want is someone who is complacent. And I know that I am not a complacent man.”

The son of a commercial artist and an 11th generation American, Wilbur was born in New York in 1921 and moved to rural New Jersey two years later, where his family lived in a Colonial-era stone house on 400 acres of land.

He was interested in music and painting early on and, as a teenager, managed to get his first verse, about a nightingale, published in John Martin’s Magazine, which paid him $1. At Amherst College, he worked on the campus humor magazine and spent enough time around student leftists to get kicked out of the Signal Corps at the start of World War II -- he was classified as “suspected of disloyalty” -- and transferred to front-line duty in the 36th Infantry.

War made him a poet. Stationed in Italy, France and Germany, with hours and days of downtime between conflicts, he recalled jotting down verse if only because it was the most practical way of expressing himself. “In a foxhole, you can write a poem, but you cannot paint a picture,” he observes.

After the war, Wilbur befriended a French poet, Andre du Bouchet. When Wilbur’s wife confided that her husband had a hidden stash of work, Du Bouchet demanded to see it and was not disappointed. He welcomed Wilbur as a fellow poet by embracing him, kissing him on both cheeks and helping him get a publisher.

His first book, “The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems,” came out in 1947, followed by “Ceremony and Other Poems” and “Things of This World,” released in 1956 and winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. He won a second Pulitzer for “New and Collected Poems,” published in 1989.

Around the time of “Things of This World,” he was asked to help on a planned musical version of Voltaire’s “Candide.” Numerous writers, including Dorothy Parker and James Agee, had been unable to get along with the demanding team of Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman. So Wilbur was brought in, because, the poet recalls, it was assumed that having translated one French satirist, Moliere, he could handle another.

Wilbur has written the occasional topical verse, but is more likely to find inspiration in a thistle or a childhood memory or the act of writing. In a Wilbur poem, life is open and tangible, yet also mysterious, blessed. “There is a poignancy in all things clear,” he wrote in “Clearness,” a line complemented, if not contradicted, by his “Advice From the Muse,” a tribute to “that slight uncertainty which makes us sure.”

“I think that the poetry I like best has always been faithful to the objective world, faithful to things our senses grasp. I don’t much care for persistently abstract poetry,” he explains.

“William Carlos Williams once said, ‘No ideas, but in things.’ I feel very much that way. It seems to me poetry at its best represents all of our ways of knowing at once, and sense perception is an important part of our knowing. I’m always glad when a poem of mine seems to comprehend something very concretely.”

Wilbur still writes every day, in longhand, then transcribes his work on a manual typewriter. Just as poetry and translation call for very different talents, so they also make different demands on his daily life.

“When I’m translating a play -- like this one by Corneille -- I write obsessively all day,” he says. “Even when I’m taking a nap, there are lines working in my mind. It’s both very exciting and very enervating to do a job of translation like that, in which you have to find the English equivalent of 1,600 lines.

“As for poems, one doesn’t set a poem aside until it’s done. But it’s possible to take a nap while you’re still writing a poem.”