Richard+Wilbur's+MIND

="Mind"= = = To begin, we will listen to an [|audio clip] of the poem "Mind" which was written by Richard Wilbur.

Now, let's do a cold analysis of the poem, assuming no prior knowledge.

Richard Wilbur (born March 1, 1921, in New York City) is a United States poet. He graduated from Amherst College in 1942, then fought in Europe during World War II. After a teaching stint at Harvard, he moved to Wesleyan University as Professor of English, a position he occupied there for the rest of his career. He has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and in 1987 was the second poet, after Robert Penn Warren to be named U.S. [|Poet Laureate]. From the start, Wilbur's poetry was characterized by a formal and refined beauty that was often imitated but never equalled. So formidable are his verse-making skills and his native wit that even the longest and most philosophical of his poems carry the reader effortlessly along. It is possible for the average educated reader to finish Wilbur's collected poems at a single sitting, and to find the experience very enjoyable indeed. For this reason, Wilbur is sometimes dismissed as a lightweight or a reactionary. However, it seems likely that his poetry will survive long after his trendier contemporaries have been forgotten. Continuing and refining the tradition of Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, Wilbur's poetry finds illumination in everyday experiences and expresses it in beautiful, carefully wrought language. He is also noted as a translator, particularly of 17th century French dramas, whose original verse forms give Wilbur an opportunity to flex his muscles in both translation and verse. His translations of Molière and Jean Racine are well respected and many are still in print.
 * Biography by:** This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Richard Wilbur.

HOON writes:
If you’re a teacher, or someone looking for a poem to recommend to some young ‘un, or class, just learning to recite, this is certainly a good one to consider. Humorous, with its made-up word, intellection, it is self-referential, demonstrating in its own intellectual word play, the very moral it wants to convey, the joy of recreational thought. Its mocking, lecturing tone, gives the young reciter a firm idea of a pose to aim-for.