Richard Wilbur's "Advice to a Prophet"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

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4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2024

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

Richard Wilbur was born in New York City on March 1, 1921 and studied at Amherst College before serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. He later attended Harvard University.

Wilbur’s first book of poems, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (Reynal & Hitchcock) was published in 1947. Since then, he has published several books of poems, including Anterooms: New Poems and Translations (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010); Collected Poems, 1943–2004 (Harvest Books, 2004); Mayflies: New Poems and Translations (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000); New and Collected Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Mind-Reader: New Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translations (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969); Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961); Things of This World (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Ceremony and Other Poems (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950).

Wilbur also published numerous translations of French plays—specifically those of the seventeenth century French dramatists Molière and Jean Racine—as well as poetry by Paul Valéry, François Villon, Charles Baudelaire, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, and others. Wilbur is also the author of several books for children and a few collections of prose pieces, and has edited such books as Poems of Shakespeare (Penguin Books, 1966) and The Complete Poems of Poe (Dell Publishing Company, 1959).

About Wilbur’s poems, one reviewer for the Washington Post said, “Throughout his career Wilbur has shown, within the compass of his classicism, enviable variety. His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection.”

Among Wilbur’s honors are the Wallace Stevens Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Frost Medal, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Bollingen Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Ford Foundation Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, the National Arts Club medal of honor for literature, two PEN translation awards, the Prix de Rome Fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Award. He was elected a chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques and is a former poet laureate of the United States.

Wilbur served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1961 to 1995. He died on October 15, 2017 in Belmont, Massachusetts.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, September 20th, 2004. Today's poem comes from Richard Wilbur, and it's called Advice to a Prophet. Wilbur, who was born in 1921 and died only recently in 2017, lived through most of the 20th century
0:25.9	and had, I think it's fair to say, a decent grasp on how things were going.
0:32.1	So this poem is an apocalyptic poem offered into those circumstances, circumstances which are or are very like unto our own.
0:45.8	And the true meaning of the word apocalyptic is important here.
0:50.3	Not only is it directing our attention to this idea of the end of the world or the end of a world,
0:57.0	but the lexical meaning of the word, the oldest sense of the word, apocalypse is an uncovering.
1:04.0	Often it is at the ending of a world or a world order that things are revealed or uncovered, especially if we're dealing
1:13.6	with a prophecy about the end of the world, an uncovering or a revealing about what is to come.
1:19.5	This poem then is a kind of hypothetical apocalypse in offering advice to a prophet. The speaker of
1:27.3	the poem suggests to the prophet a rhetorical approach in which he helps his audience.
1:32.6	He helped us imagine what could be our fate or to imagine the worst possible fate.
1:42.8	And it's a surprising one. He says, don't come trying to scare us with
1:50.6	the talk of the death of the race. The vanishing, the end, the dying out of humanity isn't a very
1:57.8	persuasive idea, he says, because human imagination simply can't fathom it.
2:03.4	How should we dream of this place without us?
2:06.6	He asks.
2:08.2	But rather, paint a picture of everything else, nature, receding, so that man is left alone. And this poem could be read. It has been read
2:22.1	as a kind of environmental poem, warn us about greenhouse gases and deforestation and that
2:29.3	sort of thing. I think that while that could be going on in Wilbur's mind, I think that misses the point of the poem, at least to a degree.
2:38.0	Because the warning isn't about the loss of these natural beauties that we love and that will go on with or without us.
2:47.7	It's about the loss or a warning about the potential loss of what allows us to know ourselves
2:55.7	and speak about ourselves and most importantly to speak poetically about ourselves and about
	...

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