The Green Wall
New Haven: Yale University Press 1957

Saint Judith
Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press 1959

The Branch Will Not Break
Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press 1963

Shall We Gather at the River
Middletown, Ct: Wesleyan University Press 1968

Collected Poems
Middletown, Ct: Wesleyan University Press 1971

Two Citizens
New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux 1974

Moments of the Italian Summer
Washington, D.C.: Dryad Press 1976

To a Blossoming Pear Tree
New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux 1977

James Wright will be remembered, and he certainly wanted to be, as a poet of place, especially of the Midwest Place names echo through his lines as through deserted villages and wintery valleys, for Martins Ferry, Ohio, Fargo, North Dakota, Wheeling, West Virginia, are all dead or dying. Wright was, then, an elegiac poet of place. While he admired D. H. Lawrence’s essay “The Spirit of Place” and tried to follow its lead, his own subject raised a special problem since it was the departure of spirit that he best portrayed. Wright tried repeatedly to can this spirit back, but his finest poems are those which catch it crossing the last hill crest or disappearing into the mist One might argue that there is, indeed, a spirit in this place, one hopeless, ignorant, and long suffering, nonetheless beautiful and mysterious. This ghostly genius is the poet’s invention, designed to fill the vacancy of home, something conjured in the half lights of dream and memory, where soul and body, wishes and facts, inner and outer atmospheres bleed into one another.

This is, of course, a common characteristic of the literature of place. Joyce’s Dublin is the land of the snow-covered dead. And as in Joyce, the poetry of place is most often envisioned by expatriates,  through a grating of ambivalence. Wright commented in an interview with Dave Smith: “My feeling about the Ohio Valley is . . . complicated. I sometimes feel a certain nostalgia about the place. At the same time I realize that . . . our problem when we were boys in Martins Ferry, Ohio in the industrial area enclosed by the foothills of the Appalachians on both sides, near that big river, was to get out.” Poetry, the very means of escape, is ironically also the agent which brings the fugitive back. This sense of the fugitive or exile (or at least of the divided citizen), is a constant theme in Wright’s poetry, but it also had a deep impact on his style, to both good and bad effect When he struggled with it he often produced a mysterious and intelligent lyricism. But sometimes his language caved in with despair, and sometimes his deep urge to affirm caused him to abjure intellect and embrace false simplicities. When he contrived a pose of wonder (as he did in the last two books), his language became prosaic rather than pure, though he aspired toward the latter just as one yearns for childhood or home.

To read the rest of this essay—and access digital editions of our entire print archive—become a member.