Quotes About Richard Wilbur

#1. I hear poetry whenever I turn on the radio. Eminem is a better poet than just about everybody. He's better than Billy Collins; he's better than Richard Wilbur; he's better than me.

Sherman Alexie

#2. Cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones, wrote the poet Richard Wilbur, and even in the atomic era it was hard to see how the physicist's swarming clouds of particles could give rise to the hard-edged world of everyday sight and touch.

James Gleick

#3. The promising young poets, the hopefuls? I'd name Richard Wilbur, Peter Viereck, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ciardi...Leonard Bacon...but it is still too early to assertions. They're all 'in the field.' It remains to be seen how many will cross the finish line.

Robert Frost

#4. That's the main business of the poem!-to see if you can't make up a language that sets all your selves talking at once-all of them being fair to each other.

Richard Wilbur

#5. Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.

Richard Wilbur

#6. I die of thirst here at the fountainside.

Richard Wilbur

#7. A thrush, because I'd been wrong, Burst rightly into song In a world not vague, not lonely, Not governed by me only.

Richard Wilbur

#8. Happy in all that ragged, loose collapse of water, the fountain, its effortless descent and flatteries of spray ...

Richard Wilbur

#9. Writing is?waiting for the word that may not be there until next Tuesday.

Richard Wilbur

#10. What you hope for Is that at some point of the pointless journey, Indoors or out, and when you least expect it, Right in the middle of your stride, like that, So neatly that you never feel a thing, The kind assassin Sleep will draw a bead And blow your brains out.

Richard Wilbur

#11. All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know

Richard Wilbur

#12. It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.

Richard Wilbur

#13. Most women know that sex isgood for headaches.

Richard Wilbur

#14. If the king had given me for my own
Paris, his citadel,
And I for that must leave alone
Her whom I love so well,
I'd say then to the Crown
Take back your glittering town
My darling is more fair, I swear.
My darling is more fair.

Richard Wilbur

#15. To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men.

Richard Wilbur

#16. It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

Richard Wilbur

#17. There is a poignancy in all things clear, In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning. Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water We fall to imagining prodigious honesties.

Richard Wilbur

#18. To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,
When in fact you haven't of late, can do no harm.

Richard Wilbur

#19. What's lightly hid is deepest understood,

Richard Wilbur

#20. Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

Richard Wilbur

#21. The beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

Richard Wilbur

#22. The eye is pleased when nature stoops to art.

Richard Wilbur

#23. Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Richard Wilbur

#24. We know what boredom is: it is a dull
Impatience or a fierce velleity,
A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude,
To make or do. In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light

Richard Wilbur

#25. What is our praise or pride but to imagine excellence and try to make it? What does it say over the door of heaven; but, homo (sapiens) fecit?

Richard Wilbur

#26. Caught Summer is always an imagined time. Time gave it, yes, but time out of any mind. There must be prime In the heart to beget that season, to reach past rain and find Riding the palest days Its perfect blaze.

Richard Wilbur

#27. Tanka
Black-and-white Holsteins
Crowd downfield at feeding time,
Mingling their blotches.
It is like ice breaking up
In a dark, swollen river.

Richard Wilbur

#28. The strength of the genie comes from being in a bottle.

Richard Wilbur

#29. Whatever pains disease may bring Are but the tangy seasoning To Loves delicious fare.

Richard Wilbur

#30. It is not tricks of sense But the time's fright within me which distracts Least fancies into violence

Richard Wilbur

#31. I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry.

Richard Wilbur

#32. As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there,
Or a general raises his hand and is given the field-glasses,
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind.
Something will come to you.

Richard Wilbur

#33. Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.

Richard Wilbur

#34. Odd that a thing is most itself when likened

Richard Wilbur

#35. Step off assuredly into the blank of your own mind. Something will come to you. Although at first You nod through nothing like a fogbound prow, Gravel will breed in the margins of your gaze

Richard Wilbur

#36. Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.

Richard Wilbur

#37. Columbus and his men, they say, Conveyed the virus hither Whereby my features rot away And vital powers wither; Yet had they not traversed the seas And come infected back, Why, think of all the luxuries That modern life would lack.

Richard Wilbur

#38. Young as she is, the stuff / Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy: / I wish her a lucky passage.

Richard Wilbur

#39. Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

Richard Wilbur