An interview with American poet Richard Wilbur by a Randolph-Macon undergraduate has finally appeared in print—almost 60 years after it happened.

Wilbur was on campus in 1959 for a public reading sponsored by the Washington Literary Society when M. Thomas Inge ’59 asked Wilbur to sit for a Q&A. Now, in a special issue on the occasion of Wilbur’s death (October 14, 2017), the full text appears for the first time as “An Undergraduate Interviews Richard Wilbur (April 1959),” in the latest issue of The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 19.1 (spring 2018), pages 1-6. Wilbur was a major critic of Poe’s poetry and prose.

Prominent People
In his senior year, Inge had been editing for the Yellow Jacket school newspaper a series of interviews with prominent people, mostly conducted by mail. Among those he interviewed were novelist John Dos Passos, playwright Paddy Chayefsky, artist Norman Rockwell, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner. Only the Faulkner and Wilbur sessions were conducted face to face.

“I thought the Wilbur piece might be worthy of scholarly publication, so I held it back but never sought print,” says Inge, the Blackwell Professor of Humanities at Randolph-Macon College.

Wilbur was at the midpoint of his career and was beginning to receive the recognition that his poetry richly deserved. Just a few years earlier his 1956 book, Things of this World, had won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for poetry. He had also been writing lyrics for the Leonard Bernstein stage musical Candide.

Among the topics Inge discussed with Wilbur were current literature and the Cold War, the relative importance of teaching and writing, the sources and inspiration for poetry, and his own writing practices. Wilbur’s advice for aspiring poets was “to read a lot of poetry, quantities of poetry…. I do think that every poet I know who is any good has a very full acquaintance with poetry from its beginnings, in other languages too if possible.”

M. Thomas Inge ’59
Inge earned his B.A. at Randolph-Macon College and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University. Having taught at Randolph-Macon College for more than 30 years, Inge has brought this expertise to campus through several of his popular American Studies courses, such as American Humor, Graphic Narrative, and Walt Disney’s America.

Inge’s broader interests in literature, the image, and culture are demonstrated in three recent publications: “Mark Twain and Dan Beard in the Court of King Arthur,” Illustration Magazine, No. 55 (2017): 62-81; “William Faulkner, James Avati, and the Art of the Paperback Novel,” Illustration Magazine, No. 56 (2017): 56-69; and “Was Krazy Kat Black? The Racial Identity of George Herriman,” Drawing the Line: Comics Studies and Inks, 1994-1997, edited by Lucy Caswell and Jared Gardner (Ohio State University Press, 2017): 40-51.