Charlotte Wilbur, 85; inspired and guided poets

Captured in verse by her husband, the everyday gestures of Charlee Wilbur achieved a measure of immortality as she tried on a new dress in front of a mirror long ago.

"I, of course, think of her with a favorably prejudiced eye," said Richard Wilbur, a former US poet laureate whose poem "The Catch" recorded those moments as she appraised the outfit. "She always seemed to me a graceful and rather sparkling woman. Without being ostentatious, she was a very tasteful dresser and she always looked good -- not just to me."

With a fierce frown and hard-pursed lips

She twists a little on her stem

To test the even swirling of the hem,

Smooths down the waist and hips,

Plucks at the shoulder-straps a bit,

Then turns around and looks behind,

Her face transfigured now by peace of mind.

Part muse, part critic, Mrs. Wilbur's daily presence and discerning appetite for writing became part of her husband's poetic soul during 64 years of marriage as he won two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award.

She died of pneumonia April 2 in Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton. Mrs. Wilbur was 85 and had lived nearby in Cummington and in Key West, Fla.

"She was always devoted to reading. That's one reason I wrote a poem about her called 'The Reader,' " her husband said. "It was delightful to have a wife who had good literary judgment and could help me avoid publishing anything perfectly dreadful."

"The Reader" begins:

She is going back, these days, to the great stories

That charmed her younger mind. A shaded light

Shines on the nape half-shadowed by her curls,

And a page turns now with a scuffing sound.

The flutter of a page was a persistent rustle during a life steeped in literature.

Charlotte Ward was born in New York City, the daughter of writer Herbert Dickinson Ward.

Her grandfather, William Hayes Ward, was an editor at the New York journal "The Independent" when it became the first publication to run a poem by Robert Frost.

As a child she lived for a couple of years in Italy, where her father had gone to write, then moved with her family to New England. She lived on Beacon Hill while attending school and spent each summer at the family home in South Berwick, Maine.

Her father died of an infection while she was growing up and her mother, Edna Jeffress Ward, worked to ensure that she graduated from Dana Hall School in Wellesley and went to Smith College.

One evening she went on a blind date set up by the Amherst College roommate of Richard Wilbur. He met her at Sessions House on the Smith campus and the two walked into Northampton.

"I know that I was in love with her from that very moment," he said. "She has always said the same. I don't really remember much about that first date except that I was entranced. The one detail I can recall is that I said to her, 'What's your favorite city in the United States?' And she said, 'Let's each of us write down in a matchbook our favorite city and then compare notes.' It turned out we had both scribbled New Orleans. That added to our sense of being destined for each other."

She interrupted her studies to marry him just after he graduated from Amherst, and just before he left to serve in World War II.

Retroactively she was declared a graduate of Smith along with other students whose college years were disrupted by the war, her husband said.

When he was discharged from the Army, the couple began a peripatetic academic life. They lived in Cambridge while he was in graduate school at Harvard University.

As their family grew, they lived in South Lincoln, Wellesley, Houston, and in New Mexico in an adobe house at the edge of a prairie.

They spent time in Italy and lived in Connecticut when Richard taught at Wesleyan University for 20 years. He joined the Smith faculty in the late 1970s and they moved to Cummington, spending winters in Key West.

Many of the 20th century's greatest poets passed through the Wilbur households, among them Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, James Merrill, and Stanley Kunitz.

Elizabeth Bishop was a favorite of Mrs. Wilbur, who kept in touch with her husband's literary colleagues and warmly welcomed many writers.

"Whenever she saw a good poem by any of them, she let that person know," her husband said. "She was a great encourager of poets, generally. And she was a good hostess, so she rewarded good poets with good drink and good food."

"My mother was an elegant woman, an inspired cook, a great reader, and a friend and confidante to many -- a woman who could bestow on others her delight in life," said her daughter, Ellen of Cambridge.

Mrs. Wilbur's enchantment with the arts extended beyond her love of poetry.

Once when Lionel Hampton's jazz orchestra played at Wesleyan, she went to the bandleader after the concert to praise the performance and, hearing that the musicians had been on the road for weeks, invited everyone back to her house.

"Two bus loads of people came up the driveway," her daughter recalled. "And my mother said, 'I couldn't possibly cook for everybody, but make yourselves at home and cook whatever you want.' "

The band members proceeded to do so, leaving the cupboards bare, and repaid the family by inviting the Wilburs to be their guests during a performance in New York City.

"She was a person of wild enthusiasms," her daughter said. "She had a guilt-free attitude toward fun. It was a heavenly quality."

And during her many years as a serious reader, she helped her husband find his place in poetry's firmament.

"I know that as I went on writing poems, without deliberately aiming to do so I began to write with her tastes and her sensibilities, as well as my own," he said.

"I suppose the muse is thought to be a participator, but she was an unusually participating muse."

In addition to her husband and daughter, Mrs. Wilbur leaves three sons, Christopher of Arlington, Nathan of Newburyport, and Aaron of Wakefield; two grandsons; and a granddaughter.

A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. May 19 in Village Congregational Church in Cummington.