Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Monday, March 1st, 2021.

Today's poem is by Richard Wilbur, because Richard Wilbur was born on this day in 1921,

which means, of course, that today would have been his 100th birthday. He died on October 14th, 2017,

and is one of the greatest of all American poets. He was appointed the

second poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and he received

the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice in 1957 and 1989. He is one of my very favorite poets,

one that you have heard from a time or two here on the podcast.

And today what I want to do is share three different Richard Wilbur poems with you.

And I want to share some comments from an essay that another poet James Matthew Wilson wrote

about Richard Wilbur back when Wilbur passed away.

Wilbur is, as I said, one of my favorite poets, but he is, although he's a poet that I'm

going to read until I die, I am confident of that, he is probably one of the poets that I

love most that I feel least capable of speaking about.

And what I want to do today is read two of his earlier poems from his, probably his greatest collection, which was called Things of This World and was published in 1956.

And then I want to read one poem from his more recent work.

And when I do that, I'm going to share the comments that James Matthew Wilson wrote.

So first what I'm going to do is read the two early poems

from that 1956 collection, and then I'll read the comments from James Matthew Wilson, and then I'll read

the later poem. So up first is Piazza di Spagna early morning. It goes like this.

I can't forget how she stood at the top of that long marble stare amazed, and then with a

sleepy pirouette went dancing slowly down to the fountain quieted square, nothing upon her

face but some impersonal loneliness.

...