Contemporary Literary Criticism | Wright, Charles (Vol. 146) - Peter Stitt (review date Spring 1982)

Peter Stitt (review date Spring 1982)

SOURCE: “Problems of Youth … and Age,” in Georgia Review, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1, Spring, 1982, pp. 184-93.

[In the following excerpt, Stitt offers a positive assessment of The Southern Cross.]

I.

In their various ways, all five of these poets [Charles Wright, Elizabeth Spires, Bin Ramke, Laurie Sheck, Robert Penn Warren] assume the existence of an important relationship between poetry and knowledge—they write to embody meaning, suggest truth, achieve wisdom—which sets them apart from those writers whose primary interest is in the aesthetic value of the created art object, irrespective of any message it may coincidentally carry. Beyond this basic similarity, however, differences begin to appear, the most obvious being that three of these poets are young, one of them is middle-aged, and one is old. The surface trappings of wisdom, including an obvious sense of self-confidence, appear as...

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