Contemporary Literary Criticism | Wright, Charles (Vol. 146) - Calvin Bedient (review date Winter 1997)

Calvin Bedient (review date Winter 1997)

SOURCE: “Wanted: More Complexity,” in Southern Review, Vol. 33, No. 1, Winter, 1997, pp. 136-49.

[In the following excerpt, Bedient commends Wright's skeptical meditations in Chickamauga, but notes that Wright's treatment of the subject of language is not wholly successful.]

Complexity, meaning integration achieved against multiple currents, against odds, is indispensable to major poetic accomplishment. The exquisitely simple lyric—say, “O wild West Wind”—is rare; and given its extreme brevity, “O wild West Wind,” at least, is not so very simple. It is undeniably a great lyric. But major? Major implies the inner bonding of much complexity, even if the result is—as increasingly it has been required to be—half open. …

Charles Wright's Chickamauga returns us to the anguish (which is not to say the achievement) of “transubstantiated moments.”...

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