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Walking to Sleep (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)

At a glance:

The Poem

At 143 lines, “Walking to Sleep,” the longest of Richard Wilbur’s poems, is the title poem of Walking to Sleep, 1969, in which it was first collected. As the third part of that book, it concludes the section of original poems, with a number of translations following. In an interview with William Heyen (Conversations with Richard Wilbur, 1990), Wilbur confesses that the book represents eight years of work. Because poets give a great deal of thought to the placement and arrangement of poems, the placement of this poem implies that its ideas embody a...

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