SOURCE: Bawer, Bruce. “Richard Wilbur's Difficult Balance.” The American Scholar (spring 1991): 261-66.

In the following essay, Bawer explicates several of Wilbur's poems and attempts to position the poet's work against the context of Allen Ginsberg's anarchic poetry and the anger of Slyvia Plath.

Some people were born to be poets; Richard Wilbur was born to be a Poet Laureate. Forget, if you wish, his distinguished good looks, his genteel manner in television interviews, the mellifluous yet authoritative voice in which he recites his work at poetry readings, and the tasteful tie and blazer he sports on the dust-jacket photograph of recently published New and Collected Poems. He is, leaving all such things aside, the outstanding contemporary American instance of the type of poet who writes in strict forms about traditional themes, and whose poems—making, as they do, frequent, appropriate, and instructive use of meter, rhyme, imagery, alliteration...