The Poetry of James Wright

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Just after the turn of the century, Van Wyck Brooks divided American literature, in the manner of Nietzsche’s fundamental distinction between the “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” temperaments, into “Highbrow” and “Lowbrow.”1) And later, many other critics attempted to characterize American literature into two divergent camps: among them, Philip Rahv into “paleface” and “redskin,”2) Roy Harvey Pearce the “mythic” and the “Adamic,”3) and D. H. Lawrence “genteel” and “Indian.”4) Using Emerson’s terms, R. W. B. Lewis called this dichotomous situation a “lively and creative dialogue” between “the poetry of memory” and “the poetry of hope.”5) He also considered this dialogue as a source of vitality in American literature. Similarly, in the field of American poetry, certain terms or labels have come into use, especially when distinguishing between the two main trends of postwar American poetry. While the older modernist poetic style is generally referred to as “closed,” and the newer as “open,” Robert Lowell casually distinguishes between “cooked” and “raw” verse, and Ferlinghetti between poetry of “the ivory tower” and poetry of “the streets.” Some others pit “academic” against “beat.”6) More recently, Charles Altieri defined today’s American poetry as the tension between the “lucid” poets and the “lyrical” poets.7) As with the demarcation of ages, however, the boundaries between the divergencies are never so clear, because most young poets of the day progressed or shifted in their individual careers from the former to the latter. Such a polarization took up much of modern poetry. In the modern period, two major figures were on either side of the opposing camps. Williams advocated the importance of sincerity, naturalness, and emotion, while Eliot emphasized reason, impersonality, and restrained, intellect-controlled aesthetic principles. They were divergent not only in terms of the mere surface features of style or structure but of the content of the poem itself. Similar to the problem of seeing intellect or emotion as the true basis of art, this distinction has prospects for modern society. There is no denying, however, that by the late 1940s, or even the 1950s, Eliot’s poetry and his poetic theory dominated much of modern American poetry, and Williams’s lyricism was overshadowed by Eliot’s poetics of lucidity. James Wright, born in 1927, was destined, willy-nilly, to participate in American literary history, when he published his first poem in a 1949 issue of Hika, the Kenyon College student magazine. Since then, he, like most of the younger poets of his generation, became involved, consciously or unconsciously, in the literary and aesthetic melee between the polarized American poets. When Wright entered Kenyon College in 1948, Eliot’s Impersonal Theory, with its emphasis on the extinction of personality that would influence his early work, had already evolved into the rigid New Critical poetic principles advocated by a group of poets, including John Crow Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, I. A. Richards, and others who acknowledged the influence of Eliot’s poetic theories. Then followed a group of the Middle Generation of American poets in the 1950s: Richard Eberhart, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Howard Nemerov, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, etc. These were the poets who endorsed the then prevalent seventeenth- century metaphysical mode of poetry ― a controlled use of irony, paradox, and tension between opposites. Wright had clear ties to and was obviously influenced by both generations ― the New Critical poets and his contemporaries of the Middle Generation of America. What is more important, Wright had at least two direct influences from which to learn the seventeenth- century poetic methods and modes: Ransom and Roethke. Ransom was his teacher when an undergraduate at Kenyon College from 1948 to 1952, and later when a graduate student at the University of Washington, he took Roethke’s creative writing class…

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