[In the following essay, Ingalls presents an overview of Wright's formative experiences, his poetry and artistic concerns, and critical reception.]

In the beginning, Charles Wright didn't know he wanted to write poetry.

“It sort of came like a thunderbolt out of the blue,” he says.

The year was 1959, and he was 23, newly arrived in Verona: Italy, as a member of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. He had read some fiction and a little T. S. Eliot as an undergraduate at Davidson College, but no poetry to speak of—no poetry that spoke to him.

He had picked up a copy of Ezra Pound's Cantos in the airport in New York, and had taken it along with him on a sightseeing trip to Sirmione, a town on the tip of a finger of land that juts into Lake Garda, pointing toward the Alps on the opposite shore.

“I sat at the end of the Sirmione peninsula under olive trees and read Pound's poem about sitting in the same place and looking at the Alps,” he recalls.

“And boom—this was one of those classic epiphanies: Maybe this is something I can do.”

Nearly 40 years later, he has done it with a vengeance. Widely regarded as one of the best American poets alive today, Mr. Wright has won many awards for his work—most recently, this year's National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize for Black Zodiac, his 12th volume of poetry.

Mr. Wright has an “impeccable musical and prosodic sense.” Carol Muske, a poet and professor of English at the University of Southern California, wrote in The New York Times Book Review last year.

She and other critics praise the vividness of Mr. Wright's images, the precision of his language, and the musicality of his rhythms.

“A young poet can look at Wright's work to see how it's done,” Ms. Muske wrote.

Dogwood insidious in its constellations of part-charred cross
                    points.
Spring's via Dolorosa
                                                            flashed out in a dread profusion.
Nowhere to go but up, nowhere to turn,
                    dead world-weight.
They've gone and done it again,
                                                            dogwood,
Spring's sap-crippled, arthritic, winter-weathered, myth limb.
Whose roots are my mother's hair.

From “Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” Black Zodiac

Mr. Wright, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, has just completed Appalachia, which will be published in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The book is the final work in a trilogy with the working title Journeyman that includes Black Zodiac and Chickamauga (1995). It's the third trilogy that Mr. Wright has written in the last 30 years. The others are Country Music (Wesleyan University Press, 1982) and The World of the Ten Thousand Things (Noonday Press, 1990).

The notion of writing trilogies brings to mind Dante, who has been a strong influence on Mr. Wright's work, representing “in a large and amorphous sense what was possible,” he says. “He's just the greatest poet I ever read.”

He read Dante in both English and Italian. “I would read the English first and then read the Italian,” he says. “Then I could get the music of it and see what he was doing.”

Other influences include Eugenio Montale, an Italian poet whose work Mr. Wright has translated; Emily Dickinson; Gerard Manley Hopkins; and Ezra Pound.

Mr. Wright is “such an interesting combination,” Ms. Muske says in an interview. “He is in some ways a traditionalist and in some ways an innovator. That's what makes his work so intriguing.

“Although he knows meter, rhythm, and rhyme cold,” she continues, “he tries a kind of experimental scoring in his work, almost like film scoring.”

Mr. Wright builds his poems like collages, she says, combining disparate themes and conversations, high poetic discourse and plain, down-home speech. She quotes lines from “Apologia Pro Vita Sua” that refer to Mr. Wright's youth:

It's Wednesday afternoon, and Carter and I are on the road
For the Sullivan County National Bank Loan Department,
1957, Gate City and Southwest Virginia.
We're after deadbeats, delinquent note payers, in Carter's words.
Cemetery plots—ten dollars a month until you die or pay up.
In four months I'll enter the Army, right now I'm Dr. Death.
Riding shotgun for Carter, bringing more misery to the miserable.
Up-hollow and down-creek, shack after unelectrified shack—
The worst job in the world, and we're the two worst people in it.

“You can't lose those lines once they're in your head,” says Ms. Muske. “It's like hearing music that haunts you.”

Mr. Wright's brand of music is influenced by a boyhood spent in the South. He was born in 1935, in Pickwick Dam, Tenn. His father worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the family moved from town to town, following the rivers of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina.

Mr. Wright attended Davidson College, with the vague notion of becoming a writer. But fiction did not speak to him, and fiction, he says, “was what I thought everybody wrote, because I didn't know any better.”

He majored in history. He also participated in R.O.T.C. and, on graduating in 1957, entered the Army. After a quick immersion in Italian, he was posted to Verona.

Mustered out four years later, Mr. Wright enrolled in the graduate writing program at the University of Iowa. At that point, his knowledge of poetry was more or less self-taught. After the epiphany in Sirmione, he frequented the base library, devouring what it had to offer, which was “hit or miss,” he says. “I read Eliot, e.e. cummings, probably a little Frost, and Pound.”

He recalls that his lack of formal education in poetry became glaringly evident on the first day of class at Iowa. “The first sentence out of the first mouth was ‘I don't think the iambic pentameter is working well in this poem,’” he recalls. “I was dead meat. I didn't know what iambic pentameter was. I didn't know what any of that stuff was.”

“I never said anything for two years—the kind of student I detest now,” he continues. “But the older you are, the faster you learn, and also the scareder you are, the quicker you learn.

“I was scared and old and learned quickly.”

What he learned first, he says, was what everybody else was doing. Then he tried to figure out how to do something different.

After receiving a master's degree from Iowa, Mr. Wright won a Fulbright scholarship and returned to Italy to attend the University of Rome and to work on translations of the Italian poets Cesare Pavese and Eugenio Montale. Soon after his return to the United States, Mr. Wright began teaching at the University of California at Irvine. In 1983, he moved on to the University of Virginia, where he teaches poetry-writing workshops for undergraduate and graduate students.

Mr. Wright's poems contain evocative descriptions of the places he's lived, and he is generally viewed as a “poet of landscape,” as James Longenbach, a professor of English at the University of Rochester, puts it. Many of his poems are set no farther afield than his back yard. There he sits, day in and day out, observing the changes that accompany the cycle of the seasons—the swelling of buds in the spring, the flight of a bat on a summer's evening, the desultory brush of autumn leaves against the sky.

“I'm very influenced by what I look at,” Mr. Wright says. “Almost all of my poems start by something I see, rather than something I think of. Looking at something, I start thinking about and describing it. And then something else comes in.”

Warm day, early March. The buds preen, busting their shirtwaists
All over the plum trees. Blue moan of the mourning dove.
It's that time again,
                                        time of relief, time of sorrow
The earth is afflicted by.

From “Still Life with Spring and Time to Burn,” Chickamauga

He “takes very specific, unpromisingly mundane places and looks at them so hard that he discovers a universe of possibility,” says Mr. Longenbach.

By its nature, poetry is distillation—language boiled and filtered and filtered again. But more than for most poets, Mr. Wright's verse is a highly concentrated essence, his metaphors visual lozenges, like Italian fruit candies that explode with flavor when bitten into.

The brilliance and inventiveness of his images never cease to astonish, says Helen Vendler, a professor of English at Harvard University. “Just when you think that the leaves or the sky or the grass or the clouds can't be described one more way, he does it,” she says. “And each one is a fresh turn of the kaleidoscope.”

Within Mr. Wright's lush descriptions of landscapes resides an intense longing for spiritual transcendence. He compares himself to Emily Dickinson, whom he calls “the skeptical religious person who nonetheless can't stay away from thinking about it—God, religion, any possibility of salvation.”

“Not buying the whole organized package,” he says, “but not able to shake the spiritual resonances from one's life.”

                                                                                … Roses rot
In the side garden's meltdown, shrubs bud.
The sounds of syllables altogether elsewhere rise
Like white paint through the sun—
                                                            familiar only with God.
We yearn to be pierced by that
Occasional void through which the supernatural flows.
The plain geometry of the dead does not equate,
Infinite numbers, untidy sums:
We believe in belief but don't believe,
                                                            for which we shall be judged.
In winter, under the winter trees—
A murder of crows glides over, some thirty or more,
To its appointment,
                                        sine and cosine, angle and are.

From “Lives of the Saints,” Black Zodiac

Through it all, Mr. Wright maintains his perspective. He has a sort of poetic sixth sense that alerts him when it's time to back off so that his poems don't begin to sound sanctimonious or didactic. “This is an important point to emphasize,” says Mr. Longenbach. The sublime wouldn't be meaningful in his poetry, if he weren't also in touch with the mundane.

“His poems have moments of wonderful self-mockery and acute self-doubt—moments that make the ambitious project of the poetry more believable, more tenable.”

The meat of the sacrament is invisible meat and a ghostly substance.
I'll say.

From “Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” Black Zodiac

Mr. Longenbach notes that although the poet is being “his most augustly spiritual” in this work, Mr. Wright pauses to mock his own seriousness with the wry comment “I'll say.”

“I love those kinds of moments in his work, when competing aspects of his sensibility come together,” says Mr. Longenbach, “this grand spiritual side and the side that says, ‘Wait a minute, Charles. What are you talking about?’”

Ultimately, Mr. Wright says, writing poetry is “like talking to yourself.” His poems are a journal of his life's journey, beginning with that moment in Sirmione nearly 40 years ago.

“I still assume that the epiphany happened because there was something in me waiting to be opened up,” he says.

“It was the case of the irresistible force meeting a movable one.”