[In the following essay, Hoffman finds in Wright's attention to defeated people in his poetry the answer to the poet's questions: “What is good and humane action, and why perform it?”]

The condemned, the lost, the disfigured, the loved, the guilty Americans in James Wright's poems move through his stanzas as presences who make the poet speak and in speaking define himself by his reactions to them. The questions which summoned them to him, he tells us, are moral ones: “I have tried to shape these poems … in order to ask … Exactly what is a good and humane action? And, even if one knows what such an action is, then exactly why should he perform it?” Recalling Mr. Wright's admiration for Robert Frost, one thinks of Frost's apothegm about where poems begin and end; if Mr. Wright's questions are indeed the points of origin for his verse aren't the poems headed in the wrong direction? Whatever the sequence of moral concern and poem in Mr. Wright's mind, these questions and his attempts to answer them do in fact animate Mr. Wright's poetry where they might all too readily have vitiated it. For they do not ordinarily obtrude as questions to be worried but rather assert themselves in actions demanding unequivocal responses. Mr. Wright calls up his hapless ghosts in order that he may find words to describe them, pity them, love them. Many of his poems succeed because in them these separable actions are in fact made so interdependent as to seem inseparable; insofar as his moral questions are answered in those poems the answers are discovered, rather than proclaimed:

If I were given a blind god's power
To turn your daylight on again,
I would not raise you smooth and pure:
I would bare to heaven your uncommon pain,
Your scar I had a right to hold,
To look on, for the pain was yours.
Now you are dead, and I grow old,
And the doves cackle out of doors,
And lovers, flicking on the lights,
Turn to behold each lovely other.
Let them remember fair delights.
How can I ever love another?
You had no right to banish me
From that scarred truth of wretchedness,
Your face, that I shall never see
Again, though I search every place.

One who writes this well requires that we measure his work by standards no less high than those his best poems make it needless to invoke. Mr. Wright has been quoted as wishing to write in the tradition of Frost and Robinson, and he has in fact built on something like Robinson's stanzaic movement and muted irony, and Frost's meditative and conversational manner. His sensibility, however, seems less to resemble the baffled transcendental idealism of the one or the pastoral individualism of the other than it does Sherwood Anderson's compassionate discovery of the dignity of the defeated. Perhaps I think of this because Mr. Wright's evocations of smalltown Ohio have the poignance of an irretrievable Winesburg, a personal world in which the haunting complexities seem those of knowing the self in a society which still appeared simple and explicable, however cruel to those who would not accept its rule.

Such a vein of compassionating nostalgia has its limitations. One danger is a tendency somewhat to sentimentalize the objects for which one feels such pity, and even to see them not as themselves but as objects of compassion (as in “All the Beautiful Are Blameless,” “At the Slackening of the Tide,” and a poem to Caryl Chessman). Most of the time, however, Mr. Wright's tact and skill prevail against such temptations and compel the reader to accept his vision with gratitude. Most of the poems in Saint Judas are skilled variations on this theme; the other day, just as I was wondering how far Mr. Wright would extend his skein, I picked up a recent issue of The Fifties and found a ringing proclamation that he now intends “to abandon what he calls ‘nineteenth century poetry’” (a term he is said to have applied to the present book). Two poems in his “new manner” do throw Frost-Robinson-Wright away for a phrasal-line, imagistic rendering of ritualized nature poetry, a theme he seemed hitherto to spurn. Wherever such experiments lead him, one can bet a solid dollar that Mr. Wright will settle for nothing less good than what he has already written in his old style. Despite his remark in The Fifties, that old style is certainly not old hat; its felicities are genuine.