Richard Wilbur, whose meticulous, urbane poems earned him two Pulitzer Prizes and selection as the national poet laureate, died on Saturday in Belmont, Mass. He was 96.

His son Christopher confirmed his death, in a nursing home.

Across more than 60 years as an acclaimed American poet, Mr. Wilbur followed a muse who prized traditional virtuosity over self-dramatization; as a consequence he often found himself out of favor with the literary authorities who preferred the heat of artists like Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg.

He received his first Pulitzer in 1957, and a National Book Award as well, for “Things of This World.” The collection included “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra,” which the poet and critic Randall Jarrell called “one of the most marvelously beautiful, one of the most nearly perfect poems any American has written.”

In the poem, Mr. Wilbur, observing statuary in a fountain — “showered fauns” — concludes:

They are at rest in fulness of desire

For what is given, they do not tire

Of the smart of the sun, the pleasant water-douse

And riddled pool below,

Reproving our disgust and our ennui

With humble insatiety.

Francis, perhaps, who lay in sister snow

Before the wealthy gate

Freezing and praising, might have seen in this

No trifle, but a shade of bliss —

That land of tolerable flowers, that state

As near and far as grass

Where eyes become the sunlight, and the hand

Is worthy of water: the dreamt land

Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.





By the early 1960s, however, critical opinion generally conformed to Mr. Jarrell’s oft-quoted assessment that Mr. Wilbur “never goes too far, but he never goes far enough.”