Richard Purdy Wilbur was born March 1, 1921, in New York, New York, into a family of writers and artists. His mother's father and grandfather were newspaper editors, and Wilbur's father was a commercial artist in New York. When Wilbur entered Amherst College in 1938, he studied to become a newspaper editor himself, spending summers travelling the country in boxcars. In college, his writing was mostly prose, with a focus on essays and editorials. After graduation, he served in Europe during World War II, and his intimate experience with the horrors of war caused him to change his career goal, leading Wilbur to appreciate the subtleties of poetry. The idea that poetry is a way of making order out of a chaotic situation can be seen in his early postwar poems. His first book of poetry, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, was published in 1947, the same year that...