Richard Wilbur has always been recognized as a major literary talent and as an important man of letters--poet, critic, translator, editor--but he has never quite been ranked as one of the two or three best contemporary American poets. Early in his career he was overshadowed as a poet by Robert Lowell, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary's Castle in 1947 (the year Wilbur's first book of poems, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, was published) and whose Life Studies (1959) was given principal credit for important new directions in poetry that Wilbur chose not to take. In the 1960s comparisons between Lowell and Wilbur as important new poets became comparisons between Lowell and James Dickey as the country's most important poets. Since the 1970s more critical attention has been given to such poets as John Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, James Wright, W.S. Merwin, and James Merrill than...