James Wright 101

James Wright was the rarest of writers: able to both embody his moment and somehow stand outside it. He was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio; his father worked in a factory and his mother in a laundry. He wrote intense lyrics that probe the edges of human experience with rare clarity and a timeless generosity. Yet few contemporary poets have taken history as seriously: Wright embraces the entire poetic tradition, borrowing from everyone from Virgil to Vallejo to confront the deprivations of America’s past and present. Indeed, he often seemed like a living embodiment of his time and place: moving from an early formalism to the political surrealism and confessionalism of 1960’s free verse, he effectively traced the trajectory of postwar poetics and Americans’ changing attitudes about themselves. The following selection of poems, ordered chronologically, provides a brief introduction to Wright’s varied work.

“A Gesture by a Lady with an Assumed Name”
Like many of his poet peers, Wright began his career writing traditional verse in the model of his teachers John Crowe Ransom and Theodore Roethke. This poem, originally published in Poetry magazine and appearing in his prize-winning debut, The Green Wall (1957), includes highly non-traditional poetic subject matter—the “clutter” left behind by a dead prostitute—but its prosody is impeccable, consisting of six iambic quatrains. If its committed rhymes and syntactical inversions seem fusty, the poem’s plain, direct treatment of its subject is anything but. Its ending—at once pathetic and bathetic—is signature Wright.

“At the Executed Murderer’s Grave”
This longer poem from Wright’s second collection, Saint Judas (1959), is an epic of repudiation, a caustic reckoning with everything from the death penalty to Jesus Christ to the state of Ohio. Wright even mocks his own poems as “printed sighing” for “fifty cents per line.” But his lacerating blank verse belies a genuine inquiry and woundedness. Like Freud, quoted in the poem’s epigraph, Wright is wrestling with how we might love our neighbors, even those who have done unspeakable things, when we often struggle to love ourselves.

“A Blessing”
First published in Poetry magazine in 1961 as “The Blessing,” this is one of Wright’s most celebrated poems—and with good reason: at once plain and exquisite, aching and joyful, it is a masterful evocation of the ecstatic. If its opening lines render a pastoral interlude with great tenderness and vulnerability, its final ones distill the unbearable passions of Wright’s speakers into a single enjambment, into the hair's breadth between breaking and blossoming.

“Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”
At a personal and professional crossroads after the collapse of his first marriage and the publication of his sophomore collection, Wright turned to free verse, hoping to find new insight in its looser, more open forms. This poem from his landmark third book, The Branch Will Not Break (1963), is an exemplary result. Influenced by ancient Chinese poetry, Latin American surrealism, and Robert Bly’s deep-image poetics, the poem dispenses with meter and argument, instead focusing on a moment and a mood. That calm, collected mood is, of course, shattered by its final line—one of the most famous in 20th-century American poetry—which makes a leap both ambiguous and shocking.

“The Minneapolis Poem”
Even when his work was at its bleakest, Wright never lacked ambition. In the opening sequence of Shall We Gather at the River (1968), Wright extends a Whitmanian sympathy to the marginalized denizens of his city, imagining their plight not as the result of individual psychology but as symptomatic of larger societal dysfunction. As in his famous “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” Wright mixes the real and the surreal with some of his most fantastic images—“the legless beggars” with “whalebone crutches”—drawn directly from the annals of Minneapolis history.

“To the Muse”
Few love poems are as wrenching as this final one in Shall We Gather at the River, whose bereft speaker consoles and laments, comforts and grieves. Its rawness makes its central artifice all the more surprising: both the deathbed scene and Wright’s ailing beloved Jenny are fictionalized, if not invented outright. Such devices are part of the tradition: as the poem’s title reminds us, poets have long expressed themselves through figurative means. Beginning in his next book, Two Citizens (1973), however, Wright increasingly wrote to an actual beloved: his second wife, Annie, one of the collection’s titular pair.

“The Journey”
A peacefulness prevails in Wright’s later work, the bulk of which he wrote while traveling in Europe, far from the Ohio of his youth. Though he experimented with prose forms and more voice-driven work, many of final poems are unabashedly traditional, even classical in their goals—they seek wisdom and often find it. In this brief but unhurried narrative, mortality no longer terrifies the aging poet. Indeed, death surrounds him in the medieval Italian town, “whole mounds and cemeteries of it,” yet he focuses on the life he finds among the ruins, on the golden spider shining in her dust-brightened web. “The secret,” he shares with us, is “not to lose / Any sleep over the dead”: remarkable, hard-earned advice from a poet who was near the end of his own journey.