[In the following excerpt, Mason offers an unfavorable assessment of Chickamauga and contends that Wright enjoys undeserved praise and prominence within the literary establishment.]

Why is most contemporary poetry so dull?

Consider three thoughts that occurred to me while reading the work of Charles Wright: his ideas are uninteresting, his poems undramatic; his language is only intermittently charged or lyrical; he is among the best-known poets of his generation. If you believe, as I do, that these three statements do not add up, you will also catch the drift of my rhetorical opening. We live in a world in which reputation has little to do with accomplishment. Given the broad context of contemporary American poetry, often so prosaic and self-regarding that it turns away anyone who is not a “professional reader,” Charles Wright is a relatively honorable practitioner. Yet, going over most of his work in preparation to review Chickamauga, his new collection, I found very little that would justify paying hard-earned money to acquire it. Most of his poems are so flat and passive that they should have been left in a drawer; instead, they have been published in prominent magazines like The New Yorker.

Wright's defenders will remind you of his Italian and Oriental influences, his long apprenticeship to Pound's Cantos, etc. They will also tell you that Wright's project is now to thwart the reader's expectations, as if the reader were merely an inconvenience. Reviewing Chickamauga in The New Republic (August 7, 1995), Helen Vendler performed extraordinary verbal gymnastics (and ultimately made a fool of herself), trying to prove Wright a major poet. Of his title poem, she writes, “[It] climbs to a vantage point where the anonymity of history has blanked out the details.” History without details? What a brilliant idea! While we're at it, how about poetry without words? How about humming a few bars on a kazoo and calling it an epic? Vendler has often been a very good critic, and she should know better; she even extols Wright as a poet without qualities: “No objects, then; and no self; and no God. Has there ever been a more stringent set of requirements for poetry?” Never a duller one, I'll wager.

Slightly later, Professor Vendler anticipates my objections: “Such a poem will not be your choice if you are set on lyric that maintains the illusion of a direct mimetic personal speech by ‘suppressing’ its status as composed and measured language.” But I still don't follow her; is she really suggesting that direct and personal lyrics suppress their status as measured language? Doesn't she remember her own work on Keats and Yeats? Weren't those poets both personal and measured? She calls Wright “interesting” because he is “a poet who wants to acknowledge in each of his poems that a poem is a coded piece of language and yet wants also to express, by that very code, the certainty that a piece of language exhibiting structure, grammar and syntax is not ‘found art,’ but has been arranged by a questing human consciousness forever incommunicado beneath its achieved mask.” Read that passage again, then claw the wool from your eyes and you will see that Professor Vendler is committing fraud. She uses words like “measured language” and “structure,” but never satisfactorily explains how they pertain to the poetry at hand. The insufficiency of art has been a subject of lyric poetry for a very long time, but never before the twentieth century has that subject been used to justify such complacency.

Meanwhile, what about poor Charles Wright? Wade through his watery oeuvre, and you will find moments of real precision. In one early poem, he remarks, “The evening, like / An old dog, circles the hills, / Anxious to settle.” It's a fine, lovingly Southern image. But in the same book, The Grave of the Right Hand, one finds Wright at his weakest: “I would say, off-hand, that things / Are beginning to happen. …” His well-known poem “Two Stories,” from The Other Side of the River, concludes, “I'm starting to think about the psychotransference of all things.” These quotations are wrenched out of contexts that are not much more poetic. Wright's poems require a too-generous, theoretical critic like Vendler to give them stature, and many unsuspecting readers may not comprehend the power Vendler wields in the world of poetry, despite her questionable taste.

There is plenty of meditative near-spirituality in Chickamauga, but it's all air and light, history without the details:

If sentences constitute
                                        everything we believe,
Vocabularies retool
Our inability to measure and get it right,
And language don't exist.
That's one theory. Here's another:
Something weighs on our shoulders
And settles itself like black light
                                                            invisibly in our hair …

Since critics don't buy the books they review, they have the luxury of praising hogwash. Pity the reader who gets suckered into paying for it. Wright disappoints me because he can at times create a lovely, quiet lyricism, as in a poem with a clumsy title, “After Reading, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard,” but his asceticism and habitual prosiness betray the very strengths he should be building on. He can do better, though in the present context he has precious little reason to try.