Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wilbur was awarded the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize on Wednesday.

The editor of Poetry magazine and the person in charge of announcing the award, Christian Winman, had great words for Wilbur: “He has written some of the most memorable poems of our time, and his achievement rivals that of great American poets like Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop.”

The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize was established in 1986 by Ruth Lilly, an arts philanthropist, and it honors a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition.

Richard Wilbur has published the poetry books:

Mayflies (2004)
Collected Poems 1943-2004 (2004)
New and Collected Poems (1988)
The Mind-Reader: New Poems (1976)
Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translations (1969)
Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems (1961)
Things of This World (1956)
Ceremony and Other Poems (1950)
The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947)

We now give you a poem from Richard Wilbur to enjoy:

Boy at the Window

Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a God-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to paradise.

The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.

And the winner is… Claudia Emerson.

The Pulitzer board announced today that the English professor of the University of Mary Washington and Fredericksburg resident has won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

The 49 year old woman won the prestigious award for a 54 pages collection of poetry called “Late Wife.”

The story behind the book is truly interesting. Claudia Emerson, in a period of three years, took her handwritten letters reflecting on her failed marriage of 19 years and her blossoming relationship with her second husband and taped them to the walls of her home and office.

Claudia Emerson will receive a cash award of $10,000 given by Columbia University on the recommendation of the 18-member Pulitzer board.

Emerson is a graduate of the University of Virginia and earned a master”s degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She began her full-time career at Mary Washington in 1998 as a composition and creative-writing professor in the department of English, Linguistics and Speech.

You can get the book at Amazon: Late Wife: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets Series)