Wilbur wrote: “He took them home with him and reappeared at our apartment about two hours later, rushed in, and, with a marvelous display of Gallic fervor, wrapped his arms around me, kissed me on both cheeks, and declared me a poet.” Du Bouchet sent the poems to Reynal & Hitchcock and they announced that they wanted to publish Wilbur’s book. One day, Wilbur’s wife took all the poems her husband had sent her during the war and showed them to du Bouchet. Another of Wilbur’s friends was the French poet André du Bouchet, who edited a literary magazine and worked as a talent scout for a New York publisher called Reynal & Hitchcock. At Harvard, Wilbur became friends with Robert Frost, who warmed to the young poet when he realized that Wilbur’s wife was the granddaughter of the editor who had first published Frost’s poetry. But I think one of the best is to take pencil and paper - which is all you need, thank heavens, to be a poet and which makes it possible to practice poetry in a foxhole - and jell things into an experience that will be a poem.”Īfter the war, he went to Harvard on the GI Bill and set out to write a scholarly book on Edgar Allan Poe. He said of his time in the war: “There are all kinds of ways to forget how frightened and disoriented you are. As a means of coping, he began writing poems and sending them home to his wife and close friends. In his new position, he fought on the front lines in Italy and France. He said, “It was quite true that I held leftist views but then as now I had an uncomplicated love of my country, and I was naively amazed to learn that my service record was stamped ‘Suspected of Disloyalty.’” He started training in cryptography, but when the Army uncovered evidence of his involvement in leftist organizations in college, and found a volume of Marx he carried with him, they demoted him to the infantry. He planned to join the Army as a cryptographer, so he spent part of his honeymoon learning Morse code. Immediately after graduation, he married his college sweetheart.
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