James Wright

From the NAAL headnote:

Angry assertiveness . . . suggests his embattled relations with an America he both loves and hates.

This America is symbolized for him by the landscape of Ohio, in particular by Martins Ferry.

In Wright's work this landscape is harsh evidence of the way the social world has contaminated a natural world infinitely more beautiful and self-restoring.

The same social world that destroys the landscape also turns it back on those whose lives meet failure or defeat.

It is not simply that Wright sympathizes with social outcasts, but rather, as poet Robert Hass acutely pointed out:

• "The suffering of other people, particularly the lost and the derelict, is actually a part of his own emotional life. It is what he writes from, not what he writes about."

As a poet who writes out of loss -- like Elizabeth Bishop? -- Wright is elegiac, memorializing a vanished beauty and lost hopes.

So deep is his sense of loss that he will sometimes identify with anyone and anything that is scarred or wounded.

Any serious reading of his work has to contend with sorting out those poems in which this identification is unthinking and sentimental, poems which suggest that all forms of suffering and defeat are equal and alike.

What remains in some of his best work is a curiously tough-minded tenderness at work in his exploration of despair.

Wright studied with poets:

• John Crowe Ransom

• Theodore Roethke

• Richard Hugo

Wright taught at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities from 1957 to 1964.

The Horatian impluse in Wright -- restrained, formal, sometimes satirical -- helps hold in check a deep-seated romanticism.

Some elements of Wright's Romanticism:

• He idealizes nature

• He idealizes the unconscious

• Romantic characters and subject matter

In the 1960s, "Deep Image" poetry emerged -- led by Minnesota poet Robert Bly.

Relatedly, Wright had been translating the work of Spanish poets often associated with Surrealism.

He took from them, in part, a reliance on the power of a poetic image to evoke association deep within the unconscious.

The Branch Will Not Break (1963):

• Some of the poems . . . succeeded in carrying us into areas of experience that resist the discursive, but the effect of a number of poems is to exclude conscious intelligence, to celebrate "whatever is not mind."

We turn to Wright's work:

• For its fierce understanding of defeat.

• For its blend of American speech rhythms with the formal music of poetry.

• For the loveliness he finds in the imperfect and neglected.