Richard Wilbur does not pretend to identify with troubled writers. His view of the world is essentially benign. He's also much younger-looking than his age — 85.

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CUMMINGTON, Mass. — This small town, once home to 19th-century poet William Cullen Bryant, is the primary residence of one of today's most celebrated poets and translators, Richard Wilbur. The 85-year-old is a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate, often cited as an heir to Robert Frost and other New England writers.

All artists should live so well. Wilbur shares a modern, split-level house with his wife, Charlee, on about 80 acres that include walking paths ideal for a thinking man, and a tennis court and pool for exercise. A neighboring dairy farm reminds him, at times most comically, of his childhood. "Twice I have found a cow in the water of my pool, although I'm glad to say the cows survived," he says.

Sixty years after his first book was published, Wilbur is a fixture in anthologies. He will "inevitably" have a volume of his own released by the Library of America, publisher Max Rudin says.

Wilbur is regarded, not always to his liking, as a leading "formalist," a master of traditional, tempered verse that can seem old-fashioned in more radical times. He is not a Romantic given to wind-swept odes, but a man of reason who addresses his readers as fellow civilized beings.

"He's one of few writers I've ever known who has a balanced center of gravity," says fellow New England poet Jay Parini, a resident of Middlebury, Vt. "He speaks with clarity, but also with wit and subtlety. And there's not an ounce of pretense about him, in person or in his writing."

Besides his poetry, Wilbur has written children's verse, collaborated on the libretto to Leonard Bernstein's production of "Candide" and established himself as a leading translator of French playwrights.

Wilbur looks much younger than his age, with his muscular torso and thick dark hair, and remains busy writing and translating. He recently published a poem, "Thistle," in The New Yorker, and completed an English edition of Pierre Corneille's "The Theater of Illusion," to be published in April. He also participated in the National Endowment of the Arts' "Operation Homecoming," the anthology of stories from veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Poets are supposedly isolated souls, but on the walls of Wilbur's writing studio hang pictures of former President Bill Clinton ("a literate pol"), Sen. Hillary Clinton ("a bright Wellesley girl"), and Dylan Thomas ("good fun, although I suppose he was on his way to destroying himself"). Wilbur also knew a subdued Smith College student named Sylvia Plath, remembered in his poem "Cottage Street, 1953" as "the pale, slumped daughter" of her "frightened" mother.

Wilbur himself does not pretend to identify with Plath, Thomas or any other tortured artist; neither war nor old age has shaken his essentially benign view of the world, one sustained by family life and his Christian faith in the afterlife.

The son of a commercial artist and an 11th-generation American, Wilbur was born in New York in 1921 and moved to rural New Jersey two years later, where his family lived in a Colonial-era stone house on 400 acres of land.

Wilbur was interested in music and painting early on and, as a teenager, managed to get his first verse, about a nightingale, published in John Martin's magazine, which paid him $1. At Amherst College, he worked on the campus humor magazine and spent enough time around student leftists to get him kicked out of the Signal Corps at the start of World War II and transferred to front-line duty in the 36th Infantry. Stationed in Italy, France and Germany, he recalled jotting down verse if only because it was the most practical way of expressing himself.

After the war, Wilbur befriended a French poet, André du Bouchet. When Wilbur's wife confided that her husband had a hidden stash of work, du Bouchet demanded to see it and was not disappointed. He welcomed Wilbur as a fellow poet and helped him get a publisher.

His first book, "The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems," came out in 1947, followed by "Ceremony and Other Poems" and "Things of This World," released in 1956 and winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He won a second Pulitzer for "New and Collected Poems," published in 1988.