Today's New York Times reports that poet and translator Richard Wilbur has won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize of the Poetry Foundation. The article quotes Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry magazine and chairman of the selection committee as saying, "If you had to put all your money on one living poet whose work will be read in a hundred years, Richard Wilbur would be a good bet."

I concur. I've loved Wilbur's work for years, and still cherish the copy of his book, Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems that he autographed for me when I heard him lecture at Vanderbilt University some thirty years ago.

To me, the endearing thing about Wilbur's verse is the ingenious way in which he breathes new life into traditional verse forms. Robert Frost once compared writing free verse to playing tennis without a net. Wilbur expressed a similar view when he said that writing a poem using rhyme and meter is like solving a puzzle. If it is, his solutions are nothing short of dazzling.

Consider the opening stanzas of his poem, "A Summer Morning":

"Her young employers, having got in late
From seeing friends in town
And scraped the right front fender on the gate
Will not, the cook expects, be coming down.

"She makes a quiet breakfast for herself.
The coffee-pot is bright,
The jelly where it should be on the shelf.
She breaks an egg into the morning light."

The mood is both wry and folksy -- and then we are suddenly startled by that wonderful image of breaking an egg into the morning light.

Wilbur's playfulness and power to surprise is also apparent in the gentle mockery of his poem, "Playboy":

"High on his stockroom ladder like a dunce,
The stockboy sits and studies like a sage
The subject matter of one glossy page,
As lost in curves as Archimedes once."

Browse through a book of his poems, and I think you will agree that Wilbur is a good bet for a poet whose work will be read in a hundred years.