“[A]s a writer, I’m very, very slow. I’ll take any excuse whatever to get away from writing, because I’ve made it so painful a process. Between picking it up and laying it down, it sometimes takes me five years to finish off a poem. And whenever I go back to work on an unfinished poem, I do what Dylan Thomas used to do; I have to write it all out from the very beginning, and come up to where the next line is going to be, providing I can think of it. I never do leave any gaps to be filled in later…. I write so horribly slowly that by the time I do advance, by the time I do go on ahead in the poem, I’m satisfied with what I’ve finished so far…. [I]t’s far from being automatic, which isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot of the irrational in my writing, just as there must be in everybody’s. I think that one reason why I’m so slow is because I sit there half dreaming, letting rhymes suggest idiotic ideas to me, trying to stay loose and irrational.” 

— Richard Wilbur, in an interview with Gregory Fitz Gerald and William Heyen for Modern Poetry Studies (Vol. 1, No. 2 (1970), 57-67). After being so scholarly, I have to admit that I picked up the interview in Conversations with Richard Wilbur, ed. William Butts.