I have been worrying the bone of this essay for days because, in an issue of Ironwood honoring James Wright, I want to say some things against his poems. The first of his books that I read was The Branch Will Not Break. It is supposed to have broken ground by translating the imagery of surrealist and expressionist poetics into American verse. That was not what I responded to. What mattered to me in those poems was that their lean, clear, plain language had the absolute freshness of sensibility. They made sensibility into something as lucid and alert as intelligence…. I can give you an example from Shall We Gather at the River:

       Along the sprawled body of the derailed
       Great Northern freight car,
       I strike a match slowly and lift it slowly.
       No wind.
 
       Beyond town, three heavy white horses
       Wade all the way to their shoulders
       In a silo shadow.
 
       Suddenly the freight car lurches.
       The door slams back, a man with a flashlight
       Calls me good evening.
       I nod as I write good evening, lonely
       And sick for home.

Those last two lines are what I mean. They were not written by the poet who is lonely and sick for home, they were written by the man who noticed that the poet, sitting in his room alone, recalling a scene outside Fargo, North Dakota, nods when he writes down the greeting of his imagined yardman, and catches in that moment not the poet's loneliness but a gesture that reveals the aboriginal loneliness of being—of the being of the freight cars, silos, horses, shadows, matches, poets, flashlights. And that man, the man who wrote those lines, is not lonely. At least that is not quite the word for it. There is a poem by Basho that gets at this:

                   Not my human
                 sadness, cuckoo,
                   but your solitary cry.

The cuckoo, or hototogisu, is the nightingale of Japanese poetry. Its evening song has all the automatic associations with loneliness and beauty, and Basho is correcting that tradition. He is not, he says, talking about our plangent human loneliness but about the solitariness of being, of beings going about their business. The business of singing, if you are a bird, of feeling lonely, if you are a human. This is a distinction and it is the function of intelligence to make distinctions, but this one has been felt toward, with an absolute clarity of feeling, and that is what I mean by sensibility. It is a quality that flashes out from time to time in Wright's poems and it made The Branch Will Not Break an enormously important book for me. So I should probably rephrase my first sentence in the manner of Two Citizens: I want to say some things against James Wright's poems, which I love. (pp. 196-97)

Someone has calculated that the words dark, darkness, and darkening appear over forty times in the twenty-six pages The Branch Will Not Break occupies in the Collected Poems. Green must appear at least as often. And the book is full of those Wordsworthian words that no one is supposed to be able to get away with: lovely, terrible, beautiful, body, and lonely run like a threnody through all his books. I don't care how often James Wright uses any word, but I do care how he uses them and why. The early poems have helped me to think about this, particularly "On Minding One's Own Business" in Saint Judas…. The poem ends, like many of Wright's poems, with a prayer:

             From prudes and muddying fools,
             Kind Aphrodite, spare
             All hunted criminals,
             Hoboes, and whip-poor-wills,
             And girls with rumpled hair,
             All, all of whom might hide
             Within that darkening shack.
             Lovers may live, and abide.

Maybe the worst thing about American puritanism is the position it forces its opponents into. If the puritan can't distinguish a hobo from a hunted criminal, a little nighthawk from a girl who does the sorts of things that rumple hair, the poet won't. Hunted criminal, in fact, equals hobo equals bird equals girl. The puritan can't tell one from another and knows they are all bad; the poet can't tell either, only he knows they belong to the dark and are good. When he agrees to disagree with the puritan on his own terms, he gives away will, force, power, weight because they are bad American qualities and he settles for passivity and darkness. This explains why the grown man's dream is the beginning of a dark hair under an illiterate girl's ear. (pp. 199-200)

Wright has often been praised, to use the curious language of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, for his "compassionate interest in social outcasts." That has never seemed to me to be the way to say it. What has always been a remarkable, almost singular, fact about his poetry is the way in which the suffering of other people, particularly the lost and the derelict, is actually a part of his own emotional life. It is what he writes from, not what he writes about. He has a feeling in his own bones for what a cold and unforgiving place the social world is. More than that, he has a feeling, almost Calvinist, for how unforgiving the universe is…. He is fascinated by defeat the way some men are fascinated by money, as the intelligible currency of our lives. His poems return and return to this theme, to the unformed hopes growing in the warm dark and the cold dark to which they return, until loneliness and death seem like the price exacted for living. (pp. 200-01)

Over and over again in American writing, [we find the] theme or discovery, that the inner life has no place, that it makes outlaws of us. Whether it is Huck deciding to go to hell or the hell of West's Miss Lonelyhearts, or Gatsby thinking the rich with their good teeth and fast cars can transform the ugly midwestern body of the world or poor Clyde Griffith, who rises from the squalor of his childhood when he glimpses velvet curtains in a Kansas City hotel, or Robinson's loyalty to Luke Havergal and the boozy moon, there is always this sense of a radical division between the inner and outer worlds and the hunger for a magic which will heal it, a sanctification or election. It gives a kind of drama to Wright's search for a style, but it also gives me the uneasy feeling that the way of posing the problem is the problem.

These themes persist through all the later work: a poetry that aims at beauty of feeling, a continuous bone-aching loneliness, a continuous return to and caressing of the dark, a terror of the cold dark, a compassion for whoever suffers it, a desire to escape from the body. The new manner of The Branch Will Not Break doesn't signal a change in theme, but a different rhetorical strategy. The more relaxed rhythms, with pauses at line end, feel like a man taking a deep breath…. And the playfulness of the titles insists on the fact of imagination. So do the plain words from romantic poetry, lovely, beautiful, terrible, that don't describe anything but tell you that someone is feeling something. And the images let go of the known configurations so that they can look inward and try to name the agency of transformation…. This is the freshness of the book and it helps me to understand why I responded to it so deeply and why I end by gnashing my teeth over so many of the poems:

         … Only two boys
         Trailed by the shadow of rooted police,
         Turn aimlessly in the lashing elderberries.
         One cries for his father's death,
         And the other, the silent one,
         Listens into the hallway
         Of a dark leaf.

The means, this style that is to make transformation possible, keeps wanting to be the end, the transformation itself, the beauty by which we are justified. There is no ground in these lines between the violent outer world and the kid listening poetically down the hallway of a dark leaf. There must be a Yiddish joke somewhere or a story by Peretz in which the poet appears before the recording angel who asks him what he's done and he says I listened down the hallway of a dark leaf or the long dream of my body was the beginning of a dark hair, etc. And one of the angels, maybe Raphael whom Rilke called the terrible one, says, this guy has got to be kidding.

Wright knows this most of the time, that the "one wing" of beauty won't take him very far. But again and again in The Branch Will Not Break he tries to see what can be made to happen by saying beautiful things, by repeating his talismanic nouns and adjectives of the discovery of the inner world…. (pp. 203-05)

In 1963, the year in which The Branch Will Not Break appeared, Robert Bly printed in Choice a passionate, ragged, very contradictory and very important essay called "A Wrong Turning in American Poetry." He attacked the modernist movement, especially imagism, as a kind of pictorialism, mesmerized by things, frightened of the spirit, preoccupied with technique, a replica of American culture. A great deal of what Bly had to say is true. He wanted a poetry that was inward, fresh, alive to its own impulse. "When the senses die, the sense within us that delights in poetry dies." "In a poem, as in the human body, what is invisible makes all the difference." But much of it read like an evangelical tract. It distrusts the mind and it insists on the radical and permanent division between the inner and the outer, believing only in the election of inward illumination: "A man cannot turn his face at the same moment toward the inward world and the outer world: he cannot face both north and south." Imagination is the source of election and, as in Wright, the world is its enemy. "The imagination out of its own resources creates a poem as strong as the world which it faces." And, as in Wright, the world is a jail in which the soul is imprisoned. Bly translates Rilke's "die Betrejung der dicterish Figur" as "the releasing of the image from jail," and adds, "the poet is thinking of a poem in which the image is released from its imprisonment among objects." But what is an object? A horse? The round white stone on my desk? The old curled postcard of a still life by Georgia O'Keefe? It is when the imagination withdraws from things that they become objects, when it lets the world go. This is a Calvinist and solipsistic doctrine. No wonder that the poetry of the deep image is preoccupied with loneliness. (p. 206)

Galway Kinnell has said some [things similar to Robert Bly's account of the role intelligence plays in the life of the imagination] with less polemical distortion. "We have to feel our own evolutionary roots and to know that we belong to life in the same way that other animals do and the plants and the stones…. The real nature poem will not exclude man and deal only with animals and plants and stones, a connection deeper than personality, a connection that resembles the attachment one animal has for another." This seems to me to say many of the things that are valuable in Bly's essay without hauling in a Manichean dualism, if we add to it that the poem has to be made out of the whole being and not out of assent to the idea.

Wright is both a more literary and less theoretical poet than Bly or Kinnell. If Bly seems sometimes to apply his ideas about imagination to the activity of writing. Wright suffers the tenor of a style as if it were the temperament of a lover. He lives inside it, feels through it. That's why his poems reflect, with desperate force, the lameness of the isolated inner world, "the sight of my blind man," its mere sensitivity which issues so often in the same nouns and adjectives, the same verbal constructions, the same will to be beautiful. Against the defense economy, we place—as plea and touchstone—little boys wondering, wondering. Against Moloch, as Allen Ginsberg said in a moment of lovely impatience, the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit.

Aestheticism is what I am talking about, decadence. It's a cultural disease and it flourishes when the life of the spirit, especially the clear power of imagination and intelligence, retreats or is driven from public life, where it ought, naturally, to manifest itself. The artists of decadence turn away from a degraded social world and what they cling to, in their privacy, is beauty or pleasure. The pleasures are esoteric; the beauty is almost always gentle, melancholy, tinged with the erotic, tinged with self-pity. Pound and Eliot, Joyce and Lawrence grew up in a period of decadence in poetry. They did not put down the aesthetes who ought to have been their fathering generation; they honored them. (pp. 207-08)

The issue seems to me urgent and I want to say the whole thing against these poems, this tone, in Wright because his struggle with it belongs so much to our culture, to American ugliness, to every kid who wanders into every public library Carnegie built in every devastated American town and, glimpsing the dim intuited features of his own inwardness in some book of poems he has picked up, is, when he emerges into the sunlight of drug store, liquor store, gas station, an outcast and a fugitive. The Branch Will Not Break is a book vivid with inward alertness, but it also brings us up against the limitations behind the aesthetic that informs it.

Wright's subject, like Wordsworth's, is the discovery of his own inwardness and the problem of what it can mean, what form it can take in the world. A large part of Wordsworth's struggle had to do with the fact that, in his time, there was no coherent psychological or philosophical accounting for the intensity and reality of his own experience, so he labored in The Prelude both to make it visible and to find a form for it in thought. Wright's problem is different in crucial ways. For one thing, he was born a convicted sinner in southern Ohio. For another, his experience is closer to the erotic. For that reason, it seems to me, by some measure, truer because it is through the erotic that one body turns to another and social life, in which the intensity of human inwardness has to find a form, begins. (p. 208)

[Wright's poem] "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" is about a form the inner life takes in the world. (p. 209)

[The] Friday night football games [in that poem] are in one way a deeper order than either the political or the economic systems of which Blake is thinking [in his poem "London"], because their necessity is entirely imaginative. This is a harvest festival and a ritual. Ritual form is allied to magic, as it is in every community, and magic is allied to the seasons and the sexual potency of the earth.

Because this festival is American and puritan, it is an efficient transmutation of lovelessness into stylized violence. "Gallop terribly": or changing chickens into horses. It is a way of describing and evoking the animal beauty in the violence of the dying year, the explosive beauty of boys who are heroes because they imagine they are heroes and whose cells know that it will be their turn to be ashamed to go home. Even the stanzaic structure of the poem participates in the ritual. The first two stanzas separate the bodies of the men from the bodies of the women and the third stanza gives us the boys pounding against each other, as if they could, out of their wills, effect a merging. Insofar as this is a political poem, it is not about the way that industrial capitalism keeps us apart, but the way it brings us together.

This is, in other words, the poem Wright has always been writing:

                 Sick of the dark, he rose
                 For love, and now he goes
                 Back to the broken ground.

Everything about those fall nights is brought to bear here, even the harsh artificial light in which they occur and the cold and darkness that surround them…. Later again, in "A Mad Fight Song for William S. Carpenter," he will make the connection … between the beauty of football and the beauty of war. Saying that, we are in the territory of The Iliad and the territory of tragedy. Beyond any social considerations, what the fall of the year tells us is that we are all going down to the dark, one way or another. It is Homer who describes battle as the winds of autumn sweeping the leaves, terribly, from the trees and it is Homer's Apollo who watches the battle and says, with a god's luminous contempt, "Men, they are like leaves, they flourish a little and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives, and then they fade away." Suicidally beautiful: that adverb is not there to nudge us into feeling. It means what it says. It tries to describe what happens when the inner life can't find its way out of the dark and it also describes, illuminates that tendency in James Wright's art. (pp. 209-11)

Suicidally beautiful: the poems [in The Branch Will Not Break] have suffered from that temptation and the poems from this point on, the best of them I think, reflect a determination to face "the black ditch of the Ohio" and not be killed by it. This is announced—in another place by another river—in "The Minneapolis Poem," the second poem in Shall We Gather at the River, that utterly painful book…. [Wright's] response to … suicidal beauty matters to me because it introduces that odd comic tone which will continue into some very desperate poems … and because what he places over against that death is the life of the imagination. (p. 212)

A strange thing, a wonderful and strange act of imagination occurs in Shall We Gather at the River. It is the appearance of Jenny. She is the secret inside the word secret which appears so often in the book: the discovery of his spirit and of the beauty of the body and of the desire for love which grew up in Ohio and was maimed there. She is probably also the young girl in the earlier poem "Beginning" who lifts up the lovely shadow of her face and disappears wholly in the air. Shall We Gather at the River is dedicated to her…. (p. 213)

In the new poems at the end of the Collected Poems, Jenny is "The Idea of the Good," and as she emerges, her name echoing all those sentimental midwestern songs, Wright returns again and again to the terror of the river down home…. (p. 216)

What emerges from [the] birth and death [portrayed in the new poems at the end of Collected Poems] was not possible in the diction of the early poems or in the willful beauty of The Branch Will Not Break—the poems about Uncle Willie, Uncle Shortie, Emerson Buchanan, Aunt Agnes, Wright's teacher Charles Coffin, the poems of the people of Ohio, his own Winesburg. Much of this is in Two Citizens, where Jenny is identified as "the Jenny sycamore" who had been "the one wing, the only wing." But it isn't only Ohio that emerges in these poems. There is also a more open insistence by Wright on his art and the traditions of his art. And this has required him, once again, to find a new language, a style that can accommodate what he has learned and gather it to the spoken language of his childhood. The way he has achieved this is, I think, intensely artificial, even a little weird, and I think it is meant to be. At its best it's very funny and playful…. (pp. 216-17)

At other times its artfulness consists in rendering peculiarities of diction exactly. (p. 217)

Here and there in the artifice is something like boozy insistence, that strange pride that dares you to contradict…. (p. 218)

Sometimes the manner blusters through difficulty, but at their best these poems do make a wholeness. Especially "Prayer to the Good Poet" in which he links his own father to Horace, one of his fathers in poetry, and the poems to his Ohio teacher, and the unmannered fluidity and assurance (and amazed gratitude) of some of the love poems. And … Jenny becomes the sycamore, his first rising and discovery of poetry. That is why "October Ghosts" is the most crucial poem in the book, for me. It's a poem in which Wright makes a kind of peace with the terror and loneliness of "To the Muse":

                 Jenny cold, Jenny darkness,
                 They are coming back again.
                 We came so early,
                 But now we are shovelled
                 Down the long slide.
                 We carry a blackened crocus
                 In either hand.

And then these lines in which Wright seems to have, at last, two wings. One of them is Jenny who is beauty, loneliness, death, the muse, the idea of the good, a sexual shadow, a whore, the grandmother of the dead, the lecherous slit of the Ohio, an abandoner of her child, a "savage woman with two heads … the one / Face broken and savage, the other, the face dead," the name carved under a tree in childhood close to the quick, a sycamore tree, a lover, the first time he ever rose. The other wing is his art, and with both of them he returns to his native place. The lines are a four-verse summary of "The Heights of Macchu Picchu" and, because they gather—at the river—the whole struggle of James Wright's poetry. I think they are among the most beautiful and simple lines he has written:

          I will walk with you and Callimachus
          Into the gorges
          Of Ohio, where the miners
          Are dead with us.

This is the poem that ends, "Now I know nothing, I can die alone." Which is what has to be, and did not seem possible before. (pp. 218-19)

Robert Hass, "James Wright," in Ironwood, Special Issue: James Wright, 10 (copyright © 1977 by Ironwood Press; reprinted by permission of the editors), 1977 (and reprinted in The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright, edited by Dave Smith, University of Illinois Press, 1982, pp. 196-219).