Former U.S. Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur Reads

Eighty-six-year-old poet Richard Wilbur, the only living American poet to have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry two times, will be reading from his work at Bryn Mawr College on Thursday, Sept., 27 at 7:30 p.m., in the Ely Room of the Wyndham Alumnae House.

Wilbur is the author of 11 books of poems. He was awarded the Pulitzer for the first time in 1957 for the collection Things of This World, which also received the National Book Award. His second Pulitzer came 33 years later when his New and Collected Poems won the award in 1990. Wilbur's most recent works include Mayflies: New Poems and Translations (2000) and Collected Poems, 1943-2004 (2004).

In 1987 Wilbur was named the second Poet Laureate of the United States. A combat veteran of World War II, he is generally considered to be the premiere poet of "the war generation" of writers.

Wilbur is also the leading English translator of the works of Molière and Racine; a successful lyricist (he wrote much of the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein's Candide); and the author of a number of successful children's books.

"Throughout his career Wilbur has shown, within the compass of his classicism, enviable variety," wrote a Washington Post reviewer. "His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection."

Free and open to the public, Wilbur's appearance is sponsored by The Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. For further information, contact the Office for the Arts at 610-526-5210.

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