"Try to remember this: what you project Is what you will perceive; what you perceive With any passion, be it love or terror, May take on whims and powers of its own. Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection Will serve you best — unless you overdo it, Watching your step too narrowly, refusing To specify a world, shrinking your purview To a tight vision of your inching shoes, Which may, as soon as you come to think, be crossing An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle."
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Pulitzer Prize winnersAcademics from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesPoets laureateTranslators from the United States
Original Language: English
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"Walking to Sleep" (1969)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Wilbur
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Richard Wilbur
Richard Purdy Wilbur (1 March 1921 – 14 October 2017) was an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989.
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