Arts and Letters

Anyone who has so much as looked into James Wright's poetry knows that he did not consider himself a lucky man. Like so many gifted literary children of working class parents, he grew up feeling apart from a beloved father—his father toiled fifty years in the Hazel Atlas Glass Company. At the same time Wright felt that his father's patient stoic laborious life had imparted to that life a virtue and dignity which the son, with the febrile idealism of American scholar-intellectuals, did not associate with the academy or the intense rivalries of poetry.

Wright knew guilt at having departed Martin's Ferry and the industrial quagmire of the Ohio River. He was unable to love "Ohio" (a central term in his poetry that did not always require further description), unable to remember anything else so vividly. All this fed a sense of personal uneasiness in life that made Wright as a poet hearken to the now scorned example of Edwin Arlington Robinson as well as the straightforward personal style and lyrical riddles of Hardy and Frost. When Wright began his career after World War II the going style was mandarin, heavy with symbolism, decorative, on the model of Robert Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle and of Lowell's mentor Allen Tate. This was an upper-class poetry, quasi-Catholic though never as serenely devotional in the late Eliot manner as it wanted to be. It was not what Wright set his heart on—which was more like "sweet Roethke," as he called him, fiercely stoic Frost, crabbedly mournful but brightly plain Hardy.

These were poets who felt themselves under a curse—whether of Godlessness or of the lovelessness that has less to do with one's personal fortunes in love than with a universe obviously born by accident, riddled with mistakes. Wright was as plain as Hardy and Frost, if not so bold in asserting the accursed time in which he was born to set it right, the obvious disparity between the universe and one's own sacred ME, the total unrelation between them that is the real sensation of a godless universe. But personal unluckiness, as so many feel it despite a world enchanted by the "supreme fiction" of poetry, stayed with Wright to the end. Poetry made the world habitable but poetry did not lighten or redeem it. We live in a period when our immediate intellectual environment, the political world, is so totally out of our control—except for those who simulate control by enforcing it—that one of the most startling phenomenon in that ever-busy factory called the American university is the idealization of poetry, especially of a difficult putatively religious poetry that is caviar to students brought up on the junk food of their daily commercial culture—and that therefore requires elucidation, and many elucidators.

Wright's poetry was obstinately plain, not in feeling certainly—where it could be sly, elusive, heartbroken, and sardonic in the same flat Ohio voice—but plain in phrase, line, syntax, imagery. His poetry was a subdued cry of homelessness, longing, guilt, of fraternity with migrants, criminals, the murderers Caryl Chessman and George Doty, gnarled old Ohio and West Virginia factory workers—and farmers. One particular feature of Wright's poetry (in this he reminds me of what the miner's son D. H. Lawrence was able to do with the surroundings of Nottingham) is the way in which a poet coming out of the blasted countryside of industrial America was still able to tandem the glass and tire factories with what is left of rural Ohio. Toxified as it may be in that mad industrial vortex that was once the barrier between industrial North and rural South, the Ohio River valley—to its very name—is evoked in "Three Sentences For A Dead Swan" (in the book Shall We Gather At The River) the American mythology of a lost world:

There they are now,
The wings,
And I heard them beginning to starve
Between two cold white shadows,
But I dreamed they would rise
Together,
My black Ohioan swan.

Now one after another I let the black scales fall
From the beautiful black spine
Of this lonesome dragon that is born on the earth at last,
My black fire,
Ovoid of my darkness,
Machine-gunned and shattered hillsides of yellow trees
In the autumn of my blood where the apples
Purse their wild lips and smirk knowingly
That my love is dead.

Here, carry his splintered bones
Slowly, slowly
Back into the
Tar and chemical strangled tomb
The strange water, the
Ohio river, that is no tomb to
Rise from the dead
From.

The naked feeling of Wright's poetry! The modesty, the tormented quietness that holds it together as much as the metric frame! The wandering, the ever-present loneliness, a poetry essentially without "personae" yet where the poet's own cry is never glibly one of self. There is "The Minneapolis Poem":

I want to be lifted up by some great bird unknown to the police,
And soar for a thousand miles and be carefully hidden
Modest and golden as one last corn grain,
Stored with the secrets of the wheat and the mysterious lives of the unnamed poor.

So much ever-present feeling is not in everybody and is not for everybody, whatever generous Jim Wright with his natural American feeling for vox populi may have thought. Feeling is a gift. It was distinctively Wright's gift. Even when he added himself to the long American list of writer-drinkers, it was clear that he drank not, as so many American bores do, to make themselves interesting to themselves, but to lift himself out of the pit. Then he could make fun of himself as well as he could make a picture—which not Robinson or Hart Crane or Dylan Thomas made—of the hangover as not just penitential but a stage of new perceptions. In "Two Hangovers," (from The Branch Will Not Break) he carefully notes:

I still feel half drunk
And all those old women beyond my window
Are hunching toward the graveyard.

Drunk, mumbling Hungarian,
The sun staggers in,
And his big stupid face pitches
Into the stove.
For two hours I have been dreaming
Of green butterflies searching for diamonds
In coal seams;
And children chasing each other for a game
Through the hills of fresh graves.

But the sun has come home from the sea,
And a sparrow outside
Sings of the Hanna Coal Co., and the dead moon,
The filaments of cold light bulbs tremble
In music light delicate words.
Ah, turn it off.

To be in one body like that and to dream of another is to have a delicious sense of irony. Wright's most famous pieces, like his "Two Poems" about his fellow Buckeye Warren Gamaliel Harding, show what delighted so many of his students at Hunter and turned them to poetry as a fresh mode of thinking more lasting than the usual subjection to subjective emotion. Only a truly witty poet could have described Harding in the 1920 campaign as having "the vaguely stunned smile / Of a lucky man." And only a youth saturated in Ohio folklore could have written, forty years after Harding:

How many honey locusts have fallen,
Pitched rootlong into the open graves of strip mines,
Since the First World War ended
And Wilson the gaunt deacon jogged sullenly
Into silence?

Tonight,
The cancerous ghosts of old con men
Shed their leaves.
For a proud man,
Lost between the turnpike near Cleveland
There is no place left to go
But home.

"Warren lacks mentality," one of his friends said.
Yet he was beautiful, he was the snow fall
Turned to white stallions standing still
Under dark elm trees.

He died in public. He claimed the secret right
To be ashamed.

This is poetry that goes straight to my heart and mind, the interweaving of the old mischievous American plainness with poetry's genius for the unexpected, all in the flat Ohio voice that can be heard in adjoining West Virginia as the laconic mountaineer's voice. (Wright's people were Southerners, and fought for the Confederacy.) His obstinate plainness of style served cleverly in translation to bring out the variety of highly charged poets from Goethe to Georg Trakl and Cesar Vallejo.

Wright's life was not an easy one, it had enormous pools of suffering in it, and he was unlucky even in the slow strangulation of his dying. But there was a characteristical unwillingness to let go; he was working on a new book so long as he was conscious.