New and Collected Poems (Harvest Book) [Paperback]

Richard Wilbur (Author)

Book Description

Series: Harvest Book | Publication Date: September 18, 1989

This volume represents virtually all of Wilbur’s published poetry to date, including his six earlier collections, twenty-seven new poems, and a cantata. Winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

These collected poems of the Poet Laureate of the United States are, despite the prevailing view of modern poetry, a monument to the accessible and the beautiful. The language is lush, full "of heat and juice and heavy jammed excess," and deeply thoughtful. His concern for careful human stewardship of nature extends also to the artist's creative struggle to capture the truth of the world. One poignant poem, "The Writer," addresses this through his reaction to listening outside the door as his daughter earnestly struggles to compose a story on her typewriter: "It is always a matter, my darling/Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish/ What I wished you before, but harder." The collection won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1989.

From Publishers Weekly

"Reprinting six of his principal verse collections, this omnibus displays Wilbur's many facets as nature poet, mordant commentator on social mores, philosophizer and as a translator adept at capturing the varied moods of poets as different as Voznesensky,Voznesensky in web.3/lk Borges and Jean de la Fontaine. Included also are 27 new poems, plus the cantata 'On Freedom's Ground'," observed PW. The volume won the Pulitzer Prize.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; First Edition edition (September 18, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156654911
• ISBN-13: 978-0156654913
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #401,548 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The finest living American poet., April 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: New and Collected Poems (Harvest Book) (Paperback)

More than any other American poet, Richard Wilbur has something meaningful to pass on as a legacy to our language and to our culture. The question is, "will that message be heeded?" A WW2 vet, he has witnessed the sacrifice of others of his generation and hoped to make a difference to the next. In a poem he wrote to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty he laments that "we robbed their graves of a reason to die"; not a criticism of liberty, but only on how so many of us choose to waste it. He does not give us didactic Jeremiads, but only warnings all of us need to hear, in a compassionate human kinship. In one of his most famous poems, "Advice to a Prophet", he advises the prophet not to come ranting and raving about our vulnerability to nuclear destruction - but to remind all of us of our ties to the planet, our dependence on it, not just for subsistence, but for our shared human history, our means of expressing ourselves put in peril: "What should we be without the dolphin's arc, the dove's return, these things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?" Not only in the grand follies of mandkind, but also in the petty grind of daily life, "the punctual rape of every blessed day", he is a voice that counsels as a fellow man, and does not pontificate as if from on high. He prays that the wandering eye not be "folly's loophole, but giver of due regard." He discovers (and leads us to our own discovery) of the wonder that is present in mundane existence. Angel feathers in cast out bucket of dirty soap suds. Angels on a creaky tenement clothesline. Constellations in a field of wildflowers. The simultaneous holding and giving of a bouquet by a loved one: "your hands hold roses in a way which says they are not only yours" This is the same way he has written poetry.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pure technical brilliance & formalist discipline, September 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: New and Collected Poems (Hardcover)

Richard Wilbur, in "A Baroque Fountain in the Villa Sciarra", begins describing the stepped fall of the water by saying: "Under the bronze crown/Too big for the head of the stone cherub whose feet/A serpent has begun to eat/Sweet water brims a cockle and braids down...." Few writers have this sort of precision in observing the things of this world. Unlike Frost, he favors lines of varying length, such that his poems have a sort of cyclical, wavelike quality, sharing some of the lyrical aspects of Dylan Thomas' "Fern Hill" (other examples include Wilbur's "Beasts" and "A Black November Turkey"). Unfortunately, Mr. Wilbur is currently not in favor, as John Masefield is not, among the literati, since formal verse is dying and its technical vocabulary is no longer taught in many creative writing classes. Being unfashionably metrical and favoring rhyme, Mr. Wilbur has been thought by some to be staid and repressed, clinging instead to traditional forms and not having found the liberated, more individualistic voice that instructors of free verse seems to promise. Even when he has been represented in modern anthologies such as the Longman Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, he is included almost apologetically, as if the full landscape of American verse would not be adequately depicted without showing some of its rabble (the Anthology also completely excluded W. H. Auden). However, I would like to point out that not only has Mr. Wilbur won every important literary award for poetry, it sometimes seems that he has won two of each: two Pulitzers, two Bollingens, and a National Book Award, as well as having served as U.S. Poet Laureate. I would also like to apply to Mr. Wilbur the words that many anthologies seem to reserve for their more avant-garde versifiers: brilliant, sublime, magnificent. Mr. Wilbur has proven to me that that which is capable of taking the top of your head is still poetry, and that there can still be music in verse.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poems That Matter, May 23, 2000

By 

Jonathan Strandjord (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: New and Collected Poems (Harvest Book) (Paperback)

Wilbur's poems are simultaneously thoroughly terrestrial and profoundly spiritual. When he describes an object, you see it more concretely than you did before. And at the very same time, you see beyond it, to a world which is infinite in all directions. "Advice from the Muse," "Hamlen Brook," and "The Writer" are especially wonderful, both as craft and as wisdom. These are poems worth memorizing.