[In the following excerpt, Hartman, while maintaining Wright's hold on his poetic talent, judges The Branch Will Not Break to be only a sketch book, and the free verse poems in it to be “straining for relaxation.”]

The spirit of Thoreau is abroad again. It is, on the whole, a benificent spirit, kindly disposed to heifers and horses, and dangerous only to moralizers. “The moral aspect of nature,” we read in Thoreau's Journals, “is a jaundice reflected from man.” And, “Farewell, dear heifer! … There was a whole bucolic in her snuff. … And as she took the apple from my hand, I caught the apple of her eye. She smelled as sweet as the clethra blossom.” Something has driven that mood out of New England to the Midwest, and there to James Wright “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” as the title of a poem generously informs us:

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

The last line is a challenge, not a moralism. It is meant to be one impression among others: we have images and we have thoughts; here is a thought. The poet has not subdued it to image because, unlike the imagists, he is relaxed in the presence of ideas and entertains them without stylistic repression. As for his thought itself, it is quietly ironic. The idler goes to nature and learns that idleness can be a good and that his ant-like urban worrying about it has wasted his life. A nature which turns dung into gold is surely a generous country and near that Golden Age every true poet would restore.

As soon as we put Wright's poetry in the company of the nostalgic Pastoral, difficulties of judgment begin. There is, in this collection, nothing to compare with Keats's “Ode to Autumn,” Heine's “Aus alten Märchen winkt es” (which the poet quotes on the title page), or even with Thoreau's prose. As a new note (in concert with Robert Bly) in contemporary American poetry, it is certainly healthy and purgative: we have had too many of what Salinger's Franny calls “syntaxy droppings.” The Branch Will Not Break is at most, however, a sketch-book of verses, a new beginning which wants to be criticized, rather than a consummation. This may perhaps excuse the following harsh opinions.

Though all poems but one are unrhymed, in free verse, and quite casual, there is too much rhetoric. One feels the poet straining for relaxation. There is a basic difficulty of mode, a wavering between what used to be thought of as Vergilian (artificial) and Theocritan (native) pastoral. If Wright's diction, rhythm, and verse are native, the imagery of locusts, jewels, and moons is artificial, even if the locusts are home-bred. The diction too is often strangely mannered, a new sort of Poetic Diction: “the tall ashes of loneliness,” “A great harvest of convicts,” “a blind horse / Of gentleness.” The very distrust of rhetoric has left the poet open to the echoing of many rhetorics. The problem assumes an extreme form in Wright because in denying artifice he is so inevitably exposed, as a modern poet, to rival traditions of denial. To force us to read silences and disjunctions has always been a compelling virtue of poetry, yet how are we to determine the tradition of silence operative in the following “twilights”?

The big stones of the cistern behind the barn
Are soaked in whitewash.
My grandmother's face is a small maple leaf
Pressed in a secret box.
Locusts are climbing down into the dark green crevices
Of my childhood. Latches click softly in the trees. Your hair is gray.
The arbors of the cities are withered.
Far off, the shopping centers empty and darken.
A red shadow of steel mills.

Expressionistic montage, imagism, Zen, haiku discreetness—it seems to be a little of everything. The mind does not know whether to press against the poem or to become wisely passive before it. The problem is not lack of meaning but too much meaning: the absence of one controlled type of continuity. It is just possible, of course, that the theme of mutability is here extended into the very images used, which decay as if they had a half or quarter life. Even rhythms and single words (“cistern” “locusts”) are decayed out of the Bible (its Book of Mutability, Ecclesiastes). But is it the poem I admire, or is it the ingenious interpretation?

Let me hold fast to the good in James Wright. His earlier abilities have not deserted him. In some poems there is an approach to the genuine bucolic snuff. We feel Marvell's “I, easy philosopher, / Among the trees and birds confer.” Wright begins, at least, to resubmit his mind to the work of seeing and hearing. The politics of sun and wheat are, as in Thoreau, set against the artificial national cycle of slaving and spending. It is therefore poetic justice that one of the effective poems in this volume should be outrightly political in character. In “Eisenhower's visit to Franco, 1959,” Wright's blatant imagery of dark and light links the deadening abstraction of photographs to a (one hopes) dying mentality of innocence that saw everything political in terms of black and white.