The catbird's song

the long version

The Catbird's Song is a selection of prose pieces, on a variety of topics, by one of the most distinguished poets and translators of our time, Richard Wilbur - former Poet Laureate of the United States, winner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the PEN Translation Award. These lectures, letters, reviews, addresses, prefaces, and interviews, what Wilbur calls the "prose by-products of a poet's life," not only reveal the ideas and concerns that inform his remarkable oeuvre; they offer fresh takes on the works and lives of poets we thought we knew; poets we ought to know; and much more.