Poems by Richard Wilbur

Thank you for publishing this dynamic world of writingthat Mr. Wilbur captured, like a whole sail boat in a bottle complete with the entire ocean. Glorious commentary on the relationship and the process. All the more wonderful read aloud. You are really using all your media. And greetings to Craig Lambert, who wrote the piece for the magazine. Wonderfully done.

Craig Lambert’s brief biography and commentary about Richard Wilbur was a most enjoyable, and at the same time somewhat nostalgic read for me. I also entered Harvard in the fall of ’46 on the G.I.Bill having been an infantryman in WWII (Battle of the Bulge—-so the remark about “no atheists in foxholes” hit home. However, I entered as a Junior (having been at Boston College prior to going into the service), and also was a student of physics! However I did audit a course on the lake poets, perhaps it was that fall. And all I remember from the course was the professor mocking Wordsworth’s lines about “Lena Foy and her idiot boy.” In the summer of 1947, I broke away from strict physics and math courses and took reading courses in French and German. In later years it has been fascinating to read about all the gifted poets I overlapped with at Harvard, while spending most of my time solving math and physics problems. However, later at the University of Chicago, I had the opportunity to hear T.S. Eliot (there was adequate room in Ida Noyes Hall), W.H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas—-such an impressive deliverer of his poems. I was delighted to learn that Wilbur still plays tennis and has a fast serve. With me I mainly aim to get it in play. Once again, it was a very warm piece,amd makes me almost wish I had followed the recommendations of my advisor, J.H. Van Vleck, who kept saying to me, “Take English Mr.Tangherlini, take English.” Youth rarely listens. It would have been stimulating indeed to have met students like Richard Wilbur and perhaps had a beer together.

Enjoyed discovering Richard Wilbur. New England has been blessed with many fine poets and the article will provide encouragement for explorations of his work! Thanks

Hello. Richard Wilbur is a tennis player. But there are only three tennis players in the world who also are oarsmen. That would be Craig Lambert, the author of this article, John Higginson, a relative of Thomas W. Higginson, who was Emily Dickinson’s friend, and myself, who am (or was at least before I wrote this letter) a friend of Ellen Dickinson Wilbur, the character in “The Writer.” I sing here of tennis, not poetry or Ellen’s very real fiction or rowing— specifically the tennis of Richard Wilbur, who has, after all, used tennis for what it tells us about Theodore Roethke (very agile for someone who didn’t appear so), and who has compared writing a sonnet to execution of a drop-shot, particularly in the instantaneous marshalling of numerous, complex parts around the clear purpose required by both. Rightfully, Frank R. Tangherline ’48 commends Mr. Wilbur for his fast serve, but as someone who plays every day, I have to ask: Wasn’t Richard Wilbur speaking of the speed of his motion rather than miles per hour? The great thing about a reliable service motion, fast or slow, is that you can use it to generate spin, pace, or both.

I was and am an oarsman and a tennis player and a friend of my distant relative, the greatest of world poets, greater than many Nobel Laureates, Richard Wilbur. I was also bowman to John Higginson’s number two on the Harvard Heavyweights with whom I disagree on the outcomes of several photo finish races, without the photograph, notably Penn, Yale, and Cornell in 1961 and 1962. In the four miles Yale race of 1961 on the Thames from Gale’s Ferry to New London, I compute we were the fastest crew ever, beating them Elis by a football field understroking them by nine beats per minute. My dropshot in tennis, by the way, is murder, as is my topspin crosscourt passing shot, friends like John Gruberg of Fresno, California, and Maurie Rasmussen of Norman, Oklahoma remind me.