The Book That Changed My Life
Richard Wilbur
Richard Wilbur won the 1957
National Book Award for Poetry for Things of this
World and was a Finalist for Translation in 1972
for Moliere's the School for Wives and again
in 1983 for Racine's Andromache.
When I was young, our family spent every Christmas season with my maternal grandparents in Baltimore, and every year I re-read the same three books - Lewis Carroll's two stories about Alice, and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. From the last I learned, over and over, that plain colloquial language is capable of subtlety and can lift into the lyrical. I later learned the same lesson from the poems of Robert Frost. Since I was going to be a writer, those realizations can be said to have changed my life.
Good wishes to you,
Richard Wilbur
Richard Wilbur (far right) pictured with (from left to right) George Kennan, Bergen Evans, and Wright Morris at the 1957 National Book Awards.