Wilbur, Richard

Richard Wilbur (1921- ) is an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Things of This World (1956) in 1957 (for which he also won the National Book Award) and for New and Collected Poems (1988) in 1989. Among Wilbur's other honors are the 1983 Drama Desk Special Award for his translation of The Misanthrope, the Edna St Vincent Millay Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Chevalier, Ordre National des Palmes Academiques. Wilbur was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 1987 and received the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton in 1994.

Henry Pettit was Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was named Honorary Curator of Rare Books in Norlin Library in the early 1950's, managing the collections and encouraging the acquisition of such materials as eighteenth-century English literature and examples of early printing. Pettit was a scholar of the English poet Edward Young (1683-1765), compiling Bibliography of Young's Night Thoughts (1954) and editing The Correspondence of Edward Young (1971).

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