Susan Sontag said that the two chief elements of the modern sensibility are “homosexual aesthetic irony and Jewish moral earnestness.” Perhaps the first qualifier in each triplet is excessive, but certainly most modern artists have traces of both qualities in some combination. In looking at his career, we can see that James Wright has moved from irony to earnestness. Because in his poetry the artist is still the suffering hero, because the outsider is still the seer, and most of all because the self is problematic even beyond the snares of the world, James Wright is modern. Because of the peculiar way these themes and subjects are articulated in his poetry, and through the course of his career, however, he might be more accurately considered a post-modern poet. But that may mean nothing more than Wright prefers the immersion of sentiment to the suspension of irony, in other words, that he acknowledges his own romanticism.

The problem of the self in the lyric poem, essentially a problem left over from the great English Romantics, animates Wright's poetry from its very beginnings. The problem can be simply stated, though seldom does Wright offer it, or resolve it, in simple terms. The lyric poem, as it approaches song as one of its aesthetic limits, threatens to dissolve the self in which it originates. Melody and pulse capture the discerning eye and the articulating voice and return them both to the status of natural forces. On the other hand, the lyric poem vindicates and justifies the self; its very structure is co-terminous with the discovery of the self which its very voicings make possible. Two loci classici epitomize the polar possibilities of this tension: where Keats, listening to the nightingale singing, says “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,” and Shelley's command to the west wind, “Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!” The voice that sings conjures a world, and that world may not have a place in it for the singer; then again, it may delight in pointing out that the world is the singer.

Whether the self is to be dissolved by its song or whether the song will dissolve the world into the singer: this unresolved problem remained to haunt the chief poets of the modern era. When Eliot says “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates,” we realize that he has come up with a radical solution to the problem. The ironic mode offers one way to deal with this set of concerns. By dividing the self over the possibilities of emotional evaporation and intellectual concentration, by choosing neither to lose the self in feelings nor to locate it in unequivocation, the poet both acknowleges the perennial depth of the problem as well as its existential fascination.

But when the Eliotic hegemony dissolved in the late '50's, the problem returned with a different set of possible resolutions. Williams reminded us that “the descent beckons,” and Roethke turned his words over to the wind. A new spirit of release, of abandonment, took over in American poetry. At one level, the new solution was a new subject matter; confessional poetry, often using irony as its dominant mode, sought to explore the “man who suffers.” But there was another way to descend into the self, as Williams also noted “A / world lost, a world unsuspected.” This other way traversed and released the buried memories of the preternatural, the mystical lost world which offered, in the wake of its discovery, a new man. But to re-discover this world, or more exactly the gnostic discipline that would open this world, the poet must immerse himself not simply in his own suffering, but in the principles of suffering itself; as he does so he must form for himself, not a tragic view, but a beatific one. As Juan Ramon Jiménez says, in Wright's translation:

And life begins to grow
within us, the delightful daylight
that cannot be switched off,
that is thinning, now, somewhere else.
                    Ah, how lovely, how lovely,
truth, even if it is not real, how lovely!

Wright begins his search, again using a poem from Jiménez, for a “divine plainness,” that will “pierce the familiar certainty,” and “place a new soul into whatever is real.”

This search leads Wright away from the irony so valued by Eliot and indulged in so often by his imitators, towards a poetry of sentiment, in which emotions are allowed freer play and the self is celebrated rather than divided. Yet such a celebration of the self takes place only when the self turns over its powers to its own emotions, its own consciousness, when, in other words, the soul is willing to dissolve the ground of its own being. Such dissolution, of course, some people identify simply as ecstasy. Wright's ecstasy, however, is not for ecstasy's sake, nor is it simply for the poem's sake. It is for Wright's own sake, it is the only way he has of realizing himself—realizing both in the sense of “becoming real” and “coming to know.” Again quoting Williams: “The descent / made up of despairs / and without accomplishment / realizes a new awakening: / which is a reversal / of despair.” This is the way Wright has chosen for himself. And in so choosing, he is willing to go “without accomplishment,” indeed, he is even willing to sacrifice an accomplishment very dear to him, the meticulous control and craft of his own verse.

If by style we mean the intersection of a peculiar temperament, syntax, and mode of perception, then Wright has become one of the most stylish of contemporary poets. His poetry has accrued to itself several various terms of description: deep image, Neo-Imagist, Jungian, American surrealist, etc. The first of these is the most natural term, since it appears in the Sixties magazine (once the Fifties, now, sporadically, the Seventies) where, with Robert Bly, Wright worked out much of his poetic. The term “deep image” connotes the nondiscursive, the archetypal. We are put in mind of Pound's description of the image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” For Pound the energy was stored in the tense but complementary relation between “complex” (the polysemous, the traditional, the ordered, “poetry as a criticism of life”) and “instant” (the concision, the sculptured edge, the “make it new” commandment). Wright accepts all this, but goes further, into the pre-conscious, if not the unconscious of the poet, beneath tradition, beyond orders of meaning into fields of light and fears of darkness.

He has been quoted as saying, with the publication of The Branch Will Not Break, that “whatever I write from now on will be different … I am finished with what I was doing.” Which is to say, he had left the aesthetic modes of the '50's behind him. But such Pauline fervor, such evangelistic absolutism is bred into Wright's midwestern sensibility from the very beginning. Even though he now teaches in New York City, we will see that his view of the metropolis still contains a wide border of Lutheran mistrust of deeds, along with a concomitant trust in redeemed, and redeeming, consciousness.

In his first book, The Green Wall (1957), a Yale Younger Poet selection chosen by W. H. Auden, Wright exhibits a consciousness, and a conscience, of an outsider, a harsh sentimentality that locates its most adequate objects in condemned prisoners and oppressed women. At least three of the poems have female personae, and Wright has spoken of his conscious imitation of Robert Frost. When the persona of a poem is male, the women presented are often shown to be insubstantial: “I sought, bewildered, for her face, / No more than splendid air, gone blind,” or “The blue dusk bore feathers beyond our eyes, / Dissolved all wings as you, your hair dissolved, / Your frame of bone blown hollow as a house …” The subtle articulation of sound effects in that last line, plus the controlled, and controlling simile, represent the dominant style of Wright's early work. Wright's control here is truly admirable, and his volume in the Yale series remains one of the best titles in what is almost bound to be a spotty list. The verse stays so polished, so delightful just as artifice, without ever becoming empty or facile, that one cannot help but wonder if Wright had not used up the dominant mode of the '50's with his very first book. But Wright's vigorously humane intelligence keeps the book from being more than a collection of set pieces.

It is no wonder that the poem that remains the sharpest, “Sappho,” is about a Lesbian relationship, spoken by the Lesbian as she laments the return of the other woman to her husband. The Lesbian in part accepts her social role as “sinner,” yet almost because of her being ostracized, her perceptions are clearer, and her emotions more authentic. By submitting she dominates. It's a moving poem, almost never anthologized, and besides demonstrating Wright's use of the outsider, it shows an extremely effective free verse line at work in the service of a psychological realism that manages to avoid stylization. Because of that, it forecasts what is to come for Wright. It is not the average ’50's poem, unless one considers that it ends in inanition.

With the publication of Saint Judas (1959) Wright began to demonstrate some of the less refined sentiment that marks his later work. This sentiment combined with a heightened rhetoric and a cultivated awe, through the use of open simple images that widened rather than defined the poems' emotional drifts. An abundant use of simple rhyme, archly phrased rhetoric, and a not-quite-relaxed colloquialism occasionally mar some of the poems. The book is, to me, less interesting than The Green Wall because it lacks a variety of personae, and its central existential “I” seems too theatrical (“I cannot live or die,” or “I looked behind me where my wings were gone”), though sometimes it has just the right mixture of boldness and disgust (“Order be damned, I do not want to die, / Even to keep Belaire, Ohio, safe.”).

Three poems deserve special mention in this volume, however. The best poems are “The Cold Divinities” and “At the Slackening of the Tide.” This is the last stanza of the former:

But slowly twilight gathered up the skiffs
Into its long gray arms; and though the sea
Grew kind as possible to wrack-splayed birds;
And though the sea like woman vaguely wept;
She could not hide her clear enduring face,
Her cold divinities of death and change.

Simple, emotional, not afraid to be vulnerable, this stanza presents the sea as perhaps only a midwesterner can see it. The religious feeling of “cold divinities” seems just right because it avoids piety and yet is both eternal (“enduring face”) and human (“like woman vaguely wept”). There is a beauty and a passiveness here, associated with the mythically feminine, which we will see again and again in the later two books as they celebrate “the mysterious lives / Of the unnamed poor.” The pervading feeling here forces on the poet, and us, a realization of the limitation of the self, as Wright verges on a total loss of self in the face of nature's unyielding immensities. Yet the effect of the emotion results from Wright's personification of the sea in such controlled and stirring terms. The self seems to both lose and find itself in the imputed hypostatis of the sea.

The third poem of continuing interest from this volume is “The Morality of Poetry,” whose very title signals a shift from the highly controlled, autotelic verse emulated by most of the then current theorizers. After saying “Before you let a single word escape, / Starve it in darkness; lash it to the shape / Of tense wing skimming on the sea alone …,” Wright describes his failure to formulate a poetics:

Woman or bird, she [the moon] plumes the ashening sound
Flaunting to nothingness the rules I made,
Scattering cinders, widening, over the sand
Her cold epistle falls. To plumb the fall
Of silver on ripple, evening ripple on wave,
Quick celebration where she lives for light,
I let all measures die.

The poet abandons measure, the principles of ordered utterance, in favor of the measure of things themselves, knowing both the beauty of moon-light and the regularity of nature will constitute his sacramental offering. This, I believe, is one of the central tenets of Wright's poetry, and it is through the unremitting adoption of this belief that Wright found his own later style. This movement from control and measure, from the strictures represented by verse, to the mysteries of self-less absorption in the reverberating patterns of nature marks a dangerous threat, as well as a wonderous promise, that Wright had been avoiding since The Green Wall and that continues to haunt him in the last poem of Shall We Gather At The River (“Come up to me, love / Out of the river, or I will? Come down to you.”) Here is the conclusion of “The Morality of Poetry”:

I send you shoreward echoes of my voice:
The dithyrambic gestures of the moon,
Sun-lost, the mind plumed, Dionysian,
A blue sea-poem, joy, moon-ripple on wave.

The poet discovers a reaffirmative poetic by emulating the release of Dionysus, by gaining a beatific vision of and through nature. Pausing a moment at the mid-way point of Wright's career, it is noteworthy that at least two things appear in both of Wright's first books: love is imaged as stone, and someone drowns. The hard measured emotions contrast sharply with the fluid rechannelings of the self; the cold light of the moon must be taken up by the changing sea.

Wright's next two books mark a decisive break from his previous mode, a break much debated and discussed, viewed as a significant step forward or, by some, as an abandonment of skill and intelligent balance. Both The Branch Will Not Break (1963) and Shall We Gather At The River (1968) employ a kind of surrealism, at least a kind of surrealist succession of disparate images, whose very isolation constitutes the tissue of the poem's structure, as well as its affective texture. The peculiar emotional feel of these later Wright poems is what is distinctive about them. In places their virtual tonelessness seems to insist that they are “gestures of the moon,” cold, implacable, and yet somehow fragile. The by now famous “Lying In A Hammock …” poem, with its flat concluding statement, “I have wasted my life,” leaps out or falls limp in the reader's face, giving or taking little quarter with safe notions about poetic logic. Yet a close examination of “Lying In A Hammock” will reveal that the last line is not a surprise; if anything it has been over-prepared for, and that, I think, is really why it gets anthologized so often. With a few adjustments it can be assimilated into a sensibility that still prizes the ironic suspension of self among several possibilities. Only in its final statement does it collapse all these possibilities into an unequivocal admission. The “black trunk,” the “distances of the afternoon,” the horse manure that “blaze[s] up into golden stones” are all extremely poeticized images. The poem itself, however, doesn't cloy because its disjunctive syntax, its refusal to subordinate or balance the clauses, rejects the control of irony and distance for the sentiment of helpless, unexcused self-victimization.

One thing should be said about these later poems: occasionally some of the lines are badly written, however they might be sincerely felt. “Tonight, / The cancerous ghosts of old con men / Shed their leaves.” “A cop's palm / Is a roach dangling down the scorched fangs / Of a light bulb.” What is most striking about the lines out of context is how overwrought, emotionally speaking, the adjectives are, and yet poetically undercharged. “Cancerous,” “scorched,” and “dangling” are slack, hackneyed, and falsely plangent. The excess feeling also causes the metaphors to blur; in fact, we are back close to something like the “emotional slither” that Pound so castigated in late Victorian poetry. The problem for Wright is to find a mode, and a diction, that will allow him to break open his consciousness with affective suddenness without succumbing to mere pathos.

Here is a poem from Shall We Gather that will illustrate most of the features of the late, developed style:

“OUTSIDE FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA”

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.

The specific geographical location, the alienated landscape (“derailed”), the ordinary gesture overfraught with significance (lines 3-4), the sudden leap to another perspective in the second stanza (notice how the temporal dimension here is mythical, featureless, a kind of ablative absolute), the world of shadows and sudden disruptions, and finally the central consciousness of the poem completes (or destroys?) itself in the last, abrupt moment. A majority of those characteristics go to make up almost every poem in the last two books. One way to read this particular poem, and others like it, is to re-read it; that is, like a periodic sentence, the controlling action comes only at the end, and we must go back and re-evaluate all the relationships in the poem on that basis. Is this poem “really” about the interior life of the poet? If so, isn't its appropriation of all those external realities a selfish, egocentric act, rather than a selfless, ecstatic one? Are the horses there because the numinous, mythical aspects of nature are necessary to give the poem depth (why the number three, for example)? Keats said he hated poetry that “had designs” on him. Surely this is that kind of poem; surely what few “literary” effects it allows itself are all in the service of taking us in, rather than getting the poet out into, the mood of the poem.

These are certainly “shoreward echoes of [a] voice,” such faint emanations that even as the moment occurs in the poem (“Calls me good evening”) it becomes no more than a poetic gesture (“I write good evening”). Here the myth of the person is central. Again Keats can help, for he defines negative capability as being in doubts and uncertainties without “any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” and something like this is operating in Wright's poetry. But where is the joy of which Wright spoke? Instead he admits “I speak of flat defeat / In a flat voice.” When he begins a poem “My life was never so precious / To me as now,” the next line is flooded with self-consciousness: “I gaze unbelieving at those two lines.” Even as early as Saint Judas Wright's sense of himself as a writer (“I croon my tears at fifty cents a line”) has been fitful, serving by turns as his greatest burden and his only salvation (“I have nothing to ask a blessing for, / Except these words.”).

This central, personal myth—that the poet must lose himself in things, for only there will he find his tongue, the only agency of his true survival—lies pervasively installed in all of Wright's poetry. That is why images of birds (“I want to be lifted up / By some great white bird unknown to the police”), and animals and insects, recur constantly along with that sense of darkness, of a world hidden inside the seen world, which promises an inhuman illumination. The myth of the social outsider, the creature whose antinomian purity is a reservoir of hope, however distant and unrealizable, merges perfectly with this redemptive view of the poet. And the scene of the poet-outsider's redemption is more and more often the body in or by which the expanded consciousness and the re-discovered word is made articulate. As Wright says at the end of “Poems To A Brown Cricket”:

Here, I will stand by you, shadowless,
At the small golden door of your body till you wake
In a book that is shining.

He speaks “To The Poets In New York” and the message, of alienation, of loss of self, of re-birth, remains the same:

You strolled in the open, leisurely and alone,
Daydreaming of a beautiful human body
That had undressed quietly and slipped into the river
And become the river:
The proud body of an animal that would transform
The snaggled gears and pulleys
Into a plant that grows under water.

There is an awesome fear of the fallen human body here that reminds me of Thoreau, and an embracing of the mundane in order to transform it that clearly echoes William Carlos Williams. And there is an Orphic mythifying of nature that recalls Goethe and Emerson. But behind it all I hear most strongly, if not most clearly, the voice of Keats: “O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts … the simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming continually on the Spirit with a fine Suddenness.”

The mind coming on the spirit with a fine suddenness: this is just different enough from Pound's “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” to be very different indeed. Instead of sharp tension and ironic movement through the phrase (cf. Pound's “Franchise for circumcision” or “His true Penelope was Flaubert,” the mot juste), we have a different sort of movement, one which doesn't value the single line so much as the reverberations at the end of the stanza. But such prosodic speculation is only part of the story (see, for example, Robert Bly's polemic against “technique” in Naked Poetry); behind this shift is a change of heart, a transvaluation of value which has reached far beyond Eliot and Pound. It mixes anti-intellectualism, symbolic looseness, Shelleyan inflation, un-ironic theatricality, all at the same time it retains much of the rigor and clarity of the Imagist revolution of the first two decades of the 20th century.

In addition to his four previously published books, Wright includes thirty-three new poems and thirty translations in his Collected Poems (1971). The translations are from poets such as Trakl, Neruda, Vallejo, and Jiménez, whose short poems seem especially close to Wright's celebratory, non-ironic spirit. The new poems are uneven in quality, often self-indulgent (“Nobody else will follow / This poem but you, / But I don't care”), sometimes bathetic (“I don't even know where / My own grave is.”), and it is easy to see why Wright did not issue them as a separate volume. Many concerns and images reappear from the earlier books, though the scene of the poem is now as likely to be the city as the country. The self-doubt and self-laceration has intensified, and it insists that we, all of us, are implicated.

We can kill anything.
We can kill our own bodies.
Those deer on the hillside have no idea what in hell
We are except murderers.
They know that much, and don't think
They don't.
Man's heart is the rotten yolk of a blacksnake egg
Corroding, as it is just born, in a pile of dead
Horse dung.
I have no use for the human creature.
He subtly extracts pain awake in his own kind.
I am born one, out of an accidental hump of chemistry.
I have no use.

Even assuming “hump” is a misprint for “lump” and that some other typographical corrections might smooth out the syntax of the third-to-last line, this passage fails for a wide range of reasons, not the least of which is its use of “mangled figures of speech” which Wright laments in the “young poets of New York.” “The kind of poem I want to write is / The poetry of a grown man,” he pleads, but this doesn't seem to be it.

That last quote is from “Many Of Our Waters: Variations On a Poem By A Black Child,” the Phi Beta Kappa poem delivered at William and Mary in 1969. The longest of the new poems, it contains the worst and the best of Wright, that is, his best sentiments and his worst writing, a “scattering poem” by his own admission. These two stanzas illustrate the difficulties:

I know something about the pure clear word,
Though I am not yet a grown man.
And who is he?
The long body of his dream is the beginning of a dark
Hair under an illiterate
Girl's ear.

The “illiterate” lets us know Wright is a sentimental liberal; the syntactical elaboration of the metaphor demonstrates how involuted and indefineable his perceptions are; the modifiers “long” and “dark” signal that he wants to remain a simple, passionate poet; the assurance of the first assertion is balanced by the humility of the unadorned second line. But do we have here an example of the “pure, clear word,” or an elaborately ironic joke which is really at Wright's expense? Surely, he can't think that his comparison really illuminates anything except his own momentary illiteracy. Yet perhaps he wants that illiteracy to be what rescues the sentiment, rescues it by its dumb, insistent, yet beautiful earnestness. Read in the context of all of Wright's poems, we have to take the poem without irony, even if that makes the poem much less successful. When one becomes as deliberately vulnerable as Wright has become, ordinary strictures about emotional control and artistic clarity are beside the point.

If you do not care one way or another about
The preceding lines,
Please do not go on listening
On any account of mine.
Please leave the poem.
Thank you.

Some poems seem only an exit for themselves, so they can only be left behind. We leave knowing what is meant, but we take no new meanings with us. When an ironic poem fails, it's because it's been too carefully suspended above its own feelings, but when a sentimental poem fails, it's because it merely immerses us in ourselves. The plainness of Wright's feelings threatens to bring a stop to the inventiveness of his words.

The risks involved in following out the dictates of his new style are considerable, and by his occasional, nervous self-consciousness Wright indicates that he is well aware of them. So far I think the rewards have been mixed for his poetry, whatever their effects on him personally. What is most challenging about the questions raised however, is that they must have made Wright, and they will surely make us, reconsider assumptions about the very nature of the self, especially as that nebulous and protean entity exist in poems. Is form itself a way of asserting and aggrandizing the self, or a way of turning the self over to larger forces? No simple talk about keeping the persona separate from the author, or extrapolating from an ironic distance, will suffice in clarifying these problems. For the reader as well as the writer the poem can be a “momentary stay against confusion,” but we take up poems and we lay them down in the exigent world. Whether we are enlarged or dissolved by them, or enlarged by being dissolved, depends in crucial ways on how and why their authors took them up in the first place. Finally, the dumbest, but most important, question we can ask of a poem is “Is it sincere?” The question is dumb because even when we can answer it, we haven't been told much. But it's something we must know.

Wright is, I believe, a sincere man, and when his poems are most successful, it's not simply because he has found a controlling form for his emotions. More inexactly, it's because the question of control has been put aside, for the voice that speaks uncovers and exhausts itself simultaneously. A good lyric poet—and Wright is that—understands that every divinity, especially the musically divine, controls and reveals itself in death and change.