SOURCE: “Dark Water: James Wright's Early Poetry,” in The Centennial Review, Vol. XXVII, No. 2, Spring, 1983, pp. 135-55.

When James Wright came on the literary scene in the mid-fifties, he possessed what few other young poets had—command. This command could be felt in the ranges of his diction, line, and stanza as well as in the varied ways he handled subjects. His writing could move from the soft romanticism of “fumbled for the sunlight with her eyes” to the neoclassicism of “I mourn no soul but his.” It could also embrace a Shakespearean “fruits of summer in the fields of love.” Being a singer of human reality, Wright's inheritance and business was song. He knew that sung and unsung nature differed greatly and that what the poet chose to sing was often seen through previous handling. He was thus removed from the questioning sincerity that W. D. Snodgrass espoused in “Finding a Poem” (1959).

I

Wright's attitudes so coincided with “the acceptable” and the stances of previous poets that their work added authority to his own. In “Prayer to the Good Poet” (1973), Wright acknowledges the Latin writer Horace as “the good father” of his enterprise, and the senses of transience, the forms, and the emphases on friendship in The Green Wall (1957) attest to a Horatian tie. There is, in addition, something Horatian in the care that the poems take in expressing common, practical wisdom. In the description of a passage to afterlife, “Father” adds the presence of Vergil or Dante in the “tiny man” who awaits the boat, and Propertius and Catullus seem to lurk as other fathers in the collection's various ghosts and uses of magic. Readers may also find in the volume's songs an indebtedness to the lyrics of George Gascoigne and W. B. Yeats, and in the diction and themes of poems like “On the Skeleton of a Hound,” “Elegy in a Firelit Room,” “She Hid in the Trees from the Nurses,” “A Gesture by a Lady with an Assumed Name,” “Morning Hymn to a Dark Girl,” and “Erinna to Sappho,” they may name Theodore Roethke, Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom, E. A. Robinson, Charles Baudelaire, and Rainer Maria Rilke as additional influences.

Less sharply defined and less immediately evident are the brooding, often darker views of ideological fathers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Matthew Arnold. From his study of Thomas Hardy, Wright seems to have hit upon Schopenhauer's presentation of the world as idea acted upon by will or spirit. Portions of Jude the Obscure (1895) are indebted to the German thinker, whose work Hardy read in the late 1880's and whose belief in man's diminished place in the universe reinforced Hardy's own pessimism. From “Dover Beach” (1851) and “Empedocles on Etna” (1852)—if not from Arnold's “The Study of Poetry” (1880)—Wright seems to have gained a sense of the present impossibility of Christian belief at the same time that its emotions were being preserved. Christian imagery and allusion function to remind rather than to relieve. In the absence of religious certitude, Arnold collapses religion into “its unconscious poetry” and demands of poetry that it be rigorously ethical. Existence's irrationality for both thinkers precedes and makes arbitrary any rational meaning man may later attach. The result, as critics of Arnold argue, is the triumph of what Soren Kierkegaard calls “aesthetic choice”: Decisions are made for the moment, and they are multifarious and entirely immediate. Poetry comes to be not so much a modernist insight into truth as the cosmetic of Robert Frost's “temporary stay against confusion.” In one's being true to one another, Arnold makes the important basis of art the I-thou juncture of humanism, and in a sense, Wright's view of the poet as singer who learns his trade from earlier singers continues this interpersonalism. Wright avoids, however, subordinating direct observation completely to acceptability, since direct observation keeps poetry from a remoteness that encourages mechanical echoes and uninteresting variation.

The presence of these various fathers in The Green Wall makes Wright's emergence as a serious, independent voice all the more unexpected. The skills with which he celebrates the timeless human conditions of “A Song for the Middle of the Night,” “On a Presentation of Two Birds to My Son,” and “Mutterings over the Crib of a Deaf Child” allay any initial misgivings and assure readers of his inclusion in a roll of permanent minor writers. The first work evolves by way of explaining to a child Eustace Deschamps' curse that one who has no children is happy, “for babies bring nothing but crying and stench.” Wright chooses for his explanation a fixed refrain and strong ballad rhythms that are reminiscent of Yeats's late lyrics and modelled on enumeration and conclusion—first, second, third, therefore. The unexpected and quick admission of “crying and stench” gives way to the reassurance that all creatures are at one time infants, and readers are swept into agreement by the poem's sanity, energy, and wit. Using the simultaneity that lodges in contrast, “On a Presentation of Two Birds to My Son” establishes an immediate opposition of chicken and swift as part of a larger opposition of everyday dullness and ecstasy. The decisions not to rhyme and to execute a normally ornate canzone in a slow, practical, flat midwestern dialect support formally the contrast and the father's admission not to know why it should be joy “to leave the body beaten underfoot.” Joy is beyond his understanding. By again approaching a chronic condition through a contrasting dialogue, Wright turns the Yeatsian doubter and believer terms of “Mutterings over the Crib of a Deaf Child” from immediate practical action to passive resignation. Imagination supplies advantages to situations that cannot be altered.

The Green Wall also shows Wright dissatisfied with conventions established by certain prevailing beliefs. Some of these dissatisfactions are themselves “conventional” and have long been concerns of poetry. “Sappho” and “Erinna to Sappho,” for instance, treat lesbian love, and “A Poem about George Doty in the Death House” and “To a Fugitive” show interest in criminals. “Crucifixion on Thursday” finds Wright fascinated by betrayal, and “Morning Hymn to a Dark Girl” celebrates the exotic, infernal pleasures of paid sex. Other dissatisfactions are personal and often less fully realized. They include “the rising dead” of “Morning Hymn to a Dark Girl,” who “fear the dark” and haunt “the upper world” of Martins Ferry. They also define the childhood “lake of slime” over which Wright prays in “The Horse” that love will “draw grass.” Responses in both cases depend on evocations generated by “underworld” and “slime” and “grass.” No objective reasons for the emotions occur. Nor is it clear why the younger brother of “Lament for My Brother on a Hayrake” must waste and break his life on hay. One must presume there are personality or social factors that remain undisclosed. Important details are also missing from the analogy of the failed rescuer and Christ in “To a Defeated Saviour.” “The Horse” moves toward one explanation in man's having “coddled the gods away,” and “On the Skeleton of a Hound” reinforces this explanation with “whispering men digging for gods” and awaiting like magi “another birth.” The suggestion is that the world of The Green Wall is without redemption. In contrast to the divine rescue of the medieval carol on which the book opens, the human rescues through love, art, singing, or personal effort which Wright describes are each insufficient to man's present condition. As in Arnold, they work to promote religious emotions independent of Christian belief.

The authority on which the volume rests gains much of its power from a comparative or mythic approach. The approach, as Nietzsche surmised, creates a semblance of greatness, as individuals echo familiar truths, appearing to speak coevally for themselves and for others, sidestepping sincerity and its usual opposition to convention. As in metaphor, the known or conventional works to control, order, and give a shape and a significance to the new, and Wright preserves a semblance of originality by avoiding in his comparisons conventional or literary expression. The language of so common and religiously resonant an image as “apples,” for instance, is kept fresh and changing. Readers have no doubt that Wright is personally familiar with the fruit when they read of its purple bruises (“A Fit against the Country”) or how human laughter tumbles “like a cider down [the] cheeks (“Arrangements with Earth for Three Dead Friends”). Indeed, the familiarity is such that in “Sappho,” Wright can use the picking of an apple in an extended metaphor for the handling of a wife, and in “The Ungathered Apples,” he can work a parallel between two apples and a woman's breasts. Similarly, in the parody of Hades and the journey to afterlife that “Father” and “Morning Hymn to a Dark Girl” provide, readers are never let lose track of an actual Martins Ferry and the Ohio River. One effect of the approach is to cement interpersonalism by promoting a literal and personal level that is so believable that it speaks for the categorical and symbolical at the same time that it appears to owe its selection to fleshing out some permanent truth. A second effect is to impart to this interpersonalism and these categories and symbolic systems a notion of unchangeability that lends a metaphysical universality to what is often a temporal and, hence, changeable condition. Situations come to appear a lot more hopeless than they otherwise would.

The language of The Green Wall also stands removed from the strong emphasis on “composition of place” that marks the technique of John Donne and the revival of his methods by contemporary poets. For these poets, imagining oneself at a particular place and imaginatively making that place real for one's readers are essential ingredients of art. Robert Lowell, for example, begins “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” (1945) with “A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket” and “Christmas in Black Rock” (1946) with “Christ God's red shadow hangs upon the wall.” In both instances, “brackish” and “red” work to narrow focus to a specific time and object, and as in the case of Donne, they foster a persona. Similarly, in the work of Snodgrass, detail helps define “the depth of his sincerity” by delineating what he “cannot help thinking.” Wright, in contrast, is likely to focus less specifically and lend his responses less to a consistent, identifiable, or sincere voice. “A Fit against the Country” begins with an unplaced “stone” turning over slowly. “A Girl in a Window” offers a beginning comparably generalized to agree with the choice of indefinite articles for the title. “The Seasonless” chooses to reject time altogether. In the place of particular stances and contexts which give meaning to words, meaning exists for Wright independent of voice and place, and the ranges of style which in The Green Wall test these meanings may be intended as much as a rejection of romantic views of language as a novice's display of virtuosity. “On the Skeleton of a Hound” begins vividly with “Nightfall, that saw the morning-glories float / Tendril and string against the crumbling wall,” but the poem inclines toward narrative, and the vividness may be part of a narrative style that allows its speakers to be characterized.

II

In interviews Wright has emphasized his neoclassical leanings, and one suspects that, as in the case of language, in understanding much of his first book, readers may benefit from a view of art similar to that outlined in Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses (1797). Rather than approach experience directly and copy its irregularities and imperfections, a neoclassical artist like Wright perceives nature through rules provided by earlier artists. Reynolds cites Proclus' account of the sculptor Phidias who, in shaping his Jupiter, “did not copy any object ever presented to his sight; but contemplated only that image which he had conceived in his mind from Homer's description.” Such an approach would maintain that “nature methodized” was “nature still” and that nature embraced not merely what was without but also the patterns by which minds interiorized and organized. The rules and grandeur of ideas—replacing the ingenious imitation of “what is”—would improve audiences ethically by tracing an ongoing consensus. Ultimately such an approach rests on accepted concepts of a sublime which “impresses the mind at once with one great idea … so overpowering that it takes possession of the whole mind” and, as in Arnold's “Christian” emotion, prevents “attention to minute criticism.” For Wright, this sublime rests securely on an aesthetic equivalent to Kant's distinction between “what is” and “what is rationally knowable.” It generates an “optative” realm—“what should be” as opposed to “what is,” and its difference from “what is” gives rise to expression. Thus, in “Lament for My Brother on a Hayrake,” the discrepancy in the opportunities that the brother should have and the life that he lives prompts an outcry. Genuine, positive action should prevail for reasons of poetic, if not social, justice. Similarly, the differences between what love, marriage, and friendship “should be” and “are” provide the basis of “Three Speeches in a Sick Room.”

Still, to insist on Wright's consciously subscribing to Reynolds' or any other single ideology is as misleading as accepting Arnold's claims only to classicism. Avid readers and conservers of poetry like Wright and Arnold tend to be eclectic. They allow themselves access to many theories, but they work usually in reaction to the possibilities presented by a particular circumstance, leaving to chance, style, or the unconscious the coalescing of poems into a coherent system. Wright's responses are to events, conversations, and reading, and they take the forms of assent, extension, or disagreement. Often, the presence of recurrent words, images, and ideas signals what have been his “real” subjects. One has only to compare the treatment of betrayal in “Crucifixion on Thursday” to that described in Matthew (26:21, 46, 49) to see how Wright alters traditional matter. Ideologies like those of Schopenhauer and Arnold lend additional vehicles and clues for determining tenors and attitudes generated by individual poems and canons. They supply comparative or mythic overviews to the informing myths selected by the poet and constitute a second, larger prizing or misprizing of experience. As in most comparisons, distortions as well as clarifications occur. Reynolds and “classicism” assuredly do not show the same interest in “social outsiders” that Wright displays. One must go to other of Reynolds' contemporaries or to the Romantics for such concern. Similarly, one finds closer analogues to Wright's view of Christianity among late nineteenth-century thinkers and contemporary existentialists than among eighteenth-century artists. Nonetheless, there is enough sympathy in Wright's poetry for the normative, the rational, the enduring, the decorous, and the restrained to benefit from using several elements in Reynolds' talks.

Saint Judas (1959) continues a number of the attitudes, themes, and preoccupations of The Green Wall. The contexts of these poems, however, have become more concrete. Compositions of place are common, though by no means are they the rule. “A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard's Shack,” for instance, begins as specifically as any Donne lyric: “Near the dry river's water-mark.” So, too, do “Devotions” and “American Twilights, 1957.” “At the Executed Murderer's Grave” consciously moves even into persona, as the poet announces, “My name is James A. Wright, and I was born / Twenty-five miles from this infected grave, / In Martins Ferry, Ohio.” One may account for their appearance in a general move of American poets toward “confessional” verse. Lowell's Life Studies and Snodgrass' Heart's Needle appeared as well in 1959. But the ethical intent Wright assigns to his volume adds another reason for character. He indicates that the poems seek to know “exactly what is a good and humane action” and “why an individual should perform such an act.” If, as Arnold supposed, religion had to depend on “its unconscious poetry” and, as Fedor Dostoevski speculated, “God did not exist,” then “everything would be permitted.” Man could choose any action since no value, pattern, or command legitimized his behavior. He became the measure of his future, and his choices—if not determined by faith in an exploded religion—were determined by instinct. In shaping his thought, Schopenhauer proposed malice, being instinctual and peculiar to man, as his starting point, and Wright cites Dostoevski's statement in Notes from the Underground (1864) that man's ability to curse or “verbal malice” is “the primary distinction between him and other animals.” Working through malice to compassion becomes one way of determining the need for “good and humane action.”

Irish writers insisted that the ability to curse was the special skill of poets, and figures like Yeats's Red Hanrahan cursed to pay back injury. “Crucifixion on Thursday” proposes that such injury and malice begin when individuals are excluded from the totems by which groups collect. In this instance, a life-sustaining “begging gesture” is denied, and such a sense of not-belonging may have haunted Wright's youth. Generalized, the exclusion reflects a primal denial, a “world curse” or “expulsion” from Eden, which, like the techniques of “What the Earth Asked Me,” may owe to Hardy but which, also, in the form of “separation from the mother” has been used by psycholinguists to explain the invention of language. “An Offering for Mr. Blueheart” adds a religious dimension in its mirroring of Augustine's theft of pears (Confessions 2:6). The un-Augustinian speaker suppresses the act of stealing rather than the temptation: The fruit remain “luscious” overhead. Self-denial seems as remote from him as ecstasy was from the father of “On a Presentation of Two Birds to My Son,” and so, too, Augustine might add, is redemption. “The Refusal” presents the effects of a continuing, mutual malice in an unexplained scorning of kin, and “Devotions” supplies an easy explanation of vengeful malice in “childhood embarrassment.” Once more, actions in the poems are described as ongoing. The reluctance of the volume to provide adequate “objective” reasons for the continuing actions strengthens the sense of an instinctual nature coevally as it allows Wright to defer handling what may remain painful issues of his growing up.

All the same, malice does not itself constitute “a good and humane action,” and readers must go to the murderer George Doty and the volume's title figure, Saint Judas, to discover how the book's “meaningless despair” and “dreams of wretchedness” resolve finally into compassion. Doty appears in The Green Wall first as the victim of exclusion. His being an outsider has spurred hopes for which no objective counterpart exists. His desperate need for love ends in rape and murder, and in “A Poem about George Doty in the Death House,” his imprisonment leads spectators to a classic illustration of malice. They come not to derive a moral lesson from his behavior but to witness deliberately and legally imposed suffering. Wright returns to Doty in “At the Executed Murderer's Grave” as a test of his own hopes and alienation. His departure from Martins Ferry offers contrasts first to his father's having become a “slave / To Hazel-Atlas Glass” and then to Doty's being caught and killed. For Wright, the town is imprisonment and death, and his desertion becomes a cowardly betrayal of dying—“the best / Of all the arts men learn”—for poetry and survival. One suspects that like so many of his betrayers, Wright, too, has committed “crimes” and may feel uneasy that he is yet to be punished. This uneasiness prompts his attraction to the failures of others and the creation of Saint Judas as his model for a world where God has ceased to exist. Having survived the death of Christ by betrayal, Judas consoles the victim of “a pack of hoodlums,” and rather than redemption, this consolation becomes the purpose of Wright's art. As in Arnold's “The Study of Poetry,” the collapse of religion leaves man relying increasingly on art to interpret, console, and sustain him.

Wright's understanding of this situation emerges in the contrasts that fill “The Morality of Poetry.” The poem examines the support given man by landscape and, hence, the poet's ability to write directly of the world and experience by “rhyming” them with nature. Will prevails in The Green Wall, and landscape seemed mainly “setting” or “idea.” Nature was the projection of various subjective states, colored in part by the poet's views of the role of the apple in man's fall from Eden and his own growing up. Nature enticed and seduced man into violence, love, waste, error, action, and freedom. It also identified those impositions from outside. “The Morality of Poetry” repeats these positions but with a difference. A clear sense of Schopenhauerian reality has settled. Underlying appearance, this reality narrows the gap between sung and unsung nature. Man and nature become part of a single will which declares its end instinctively to be good and casts about for means to survive: “Where the sea moves the word moves, where the sea / Subsides, the slow word fades with lunar tides.” On an immediate level, nature's “sheer outrage hammering itself to death” identifies a meaningless struggle for existence, and as in the writings of Augustine, this struggle of nature is cyclical and reversible. To the extent that man is part of nature, he participates in its cyclicism: Gulls “ensnare” the speaker, and the sun temporarily “charms [his] immense irrelevance away.” But the poem contains, too, the “human word” gathering “the tangled discords up to song,” and in this action, Wright posits man's clinging, too, to the unique and novel, irreversible “Christian” motion of history. By defining and sustaining the high destinies of man, this history provides a second, complementary, moral, independent level, different from the malice of Herbert Spencer's “survival of the fittest” and responsible for ideas of humaneness.

In turning away from the “lunar tide,” Wright rejects dream and insanity as ways of dealing with reality and discounts their uses by writers to promote optimism. The moves limit the kinds of consolation left open. The writer must heed Horace's warning against joining gratuitously “the neck of a horse to a human head,” overlaying “limbs gathered from anywhere and everywhere with varicolored plumage,” and making “what appears at the top a beautiful woman and below as a foul fish” (Epistles II.iii.1-4). Nor should he so lose contact with the sensible world that, as Sir Francis Bacon feared, working only with words, the writer brings forth endless “cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit.” Rather, as John Ruskin maintained, poets must learn “to see” and to tell what they see in a plain way, since “to see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion,—all in one.” For Wright as for Schopenhauer, optimism, when it occurs, requires a genuine, positive, and intellectually apprehendible purpose. Otherwise, it is negative and illusory. Since the positive purposes of the universe are found repeatedly to be irrational and aleatory, the poet must eventually address and annihilate whatever produce the illusions of rationality that act as barriers to truth. The momentary aesthetic choices which the machinery and illusions support must give way to a less attractive but more consistent system of ethical choice. In coming to question rationality, Wright must come to question as well the rational basis of neoclassical order, though not it seems its stress on species, since only through species does perpetuation occur. For the present, Wright is willing to further the guises of rational order and pattern by accepting suffering as life rather than allowing any direct acknowledgment of life's blind, primordial will.

Responses to the volumes identify Wright's faults and strengths. Readers who object to the poetry find ideology triumphing over intellect. In the face of unrelenting pessimism, they question why in some “very happiest intellection / A graceful error” does not correct “the cave.” Solutions must exist to which Wright, like the doubter of “Mutterings over the Crib of a Deaf Child,” is wilfully or constitutionally closed. These readers find the sameness of mood that pessimism generates oppressive, and they write of a fascination with death that outweighs Wright's interest in resolving matters. They anticipate and dismiss Lowell's characterization of the contemporary poet as the opposite of the politician and his “necessary optimistic stance.” These readers object as well to Wright's occasionally rapid shifts from malice to compassion, citing as example the title poem of Saint Judas. “It is, as one detractor notes, “as if a man were to claim he dug a hole for one day and [then] immediately [came] out of the other side of the earth.” Also attacked is Wright's failure to use his ghosts to deal with gaps or mysteries that might provide bridges between the rational and irrational. “My Grandmother's Ghost” suggests such a possibility in the face of Wright's general tendency in ghost poems to echo, vary, bask, and remain in the shadows of Propertius and Frost. Those readers who support Wright's efforts praise his writing for its “huge human compassion” and unusual technical skills. For them, Wright's wide scope, linguistic virtuosity, and ability to shape a world that nature might imitate generally offset any current limitations. Ideology to the extent it is perceived offers no difficulty.

III

The Branch Will Not Break (1963) represents significant improvements on and departures from the premises of these first two volumes. Fathers are still present in the figures of Goethe (“Three Stanzas for Goethe”), Frost (“Two Horses Playing in the Orchard”), and Miguel Hernandez (“In Memory of a Spanish Poet”), but they are now balanced by the book's new political figures. One has positively Po-Chu-i, “the balding old politician” of the volume's opening poem, and negatively, Presidents Warren Harding and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Their presence reflects Wright's beginning to see that the conditions producing some of man's suffering may be political and not metaphysical. Part of the perception may owe to the presence of John F. Kennedy in the White House and his invitation to correct social injustice by political action. Often what Wright objects to in politics is political dishonesty, divisiveness, militarism, false patriotism, atomic bomb testing, the falseness of old success myths, and a general American dis-ease with nature. His Harding, who wanted “to be helpful” and who looked so presidential, wants to be thought honest, despite ineptitude, political scandal, and a ridiculous, neglected tomb in Ohio. Po-Chu-i is questioned about unsolved problems of debilitating urban loneliness. Eisenhower, “the American hero,” secretly yearns for the lustrous dark egoism of military oppression, and radioactivity enters the growing bodies of children to destroy any future chances of success. Like the poor of Martins Ferry or William Wordsworth, they come quickly to see that death is their harmony with nature. Issues are broadly non-partisan, safe, and philosophically in tune with the compassion that Wright offered earlier. Identification with the sufferings of others remains the means for cancelling egoism and malice.

Some of the perceptions of political rather than metaphysical remedies for suffering derive, too, from Wright's increasing interest in nationalistic forms of expression and the social protest character of American work and folk song. In the middle and late fifties, these songs gained popularity with the successes of John and Alan Lomax at collecting and promoting them and the reissued and newly recorded performances of such figures as Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter), the Wobblies (I.W.W.), Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, and the Kingston Trio. The intimacy of the music opposed efforts at depersonalization and tested the vitality of democratic beliefs. Lyrics brought to suburban middle America the sufferings of the poor and emotional responses to injustice. With their dreams of unionism, compassion, and fraternal solidarity, the out-of-work, the exploited, the excluded, the lonely, the forgotten, the fugitive, and the self-destructive became heroic. They presented lively and always fated oppositions to the outward conformity and other-directedness of an unstoppable, restrictive corporate force. From his growing up in Martins Ferry, Wright knew the importance of such songs and models to the outsiders he celebrated. In their approximations of sonata, song cycle, and theme-in-variation, the poetries of Roethke, Galway Kinnell, and John Logan had already begun to leave room for a downtrodden. Wright seemed as eager to use them to see what they and freer musical structures might do to offset the “dreams of wretchedness” and “meaningless despair” and sameness that critics had begun to complain of. By revealing an ongoing national purpose, the two might be a way of leaving tradition and collapsed religion and responding freshly to life issues.

The differences between “A Fit against the Country” and “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” illustrate a number of the changes that occurred. “A Fit against the Country” follows the typical parataxis and divisions of medieval and renaissance song. Behind the parataxis is an imaginary or real melody to which each stanza could be sung and on which parallelism and division are based. The first stanza sets nature against the hand; the second, against the ear; the third, against the eye; the fourth, against organs of smell and taste; and the final stanza draws conclusions about differences between the body and intellect. Wright's choice of sensory rather than interpretative faculties allows for a generalizing that is consistent with his neoclassicism, however much the divisions and partition convey an almost medieval division of man and nature. The body's hope of holding its humor “away from the tempting tree, / The grass, the luring summer / That summon the flesh to fall” adds a modern realization of the body's being likewise part of nature, having climbed across the wall from “vacant paradise.” In contrast to this balance and partition, the divisions of “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” are irregular and motivated not so much by coordinating parataxis as by diminution. Rather than make the subjects of the three stanzas equal, Wright zeros in. If music is intended as accompaniment, one suspects not so much a tune as a balladeer's sequence of regularly strummed chords against which words play freely. The landscape around the “Shreve High football stadium” is described: Polacks nurse long beers in Tiltonsville; Negroes work the furnaces at Benwood; and the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel dreams of heroes. The scene narrows to a home with fathers and mothers and ends within the stadium on sons who have grown “suicidally beautiful,” galloping “terribly against each other's bodies.”

Wright acknowledges the important efforts of Robert Bly in effecting many of the changes. Bly's belief in the presence of resilient, unifying images beneath appearances encourages Wright to seek something comparable below what had become brief, illusory, and unsatisfying rational surfaces. As in the poetry of Yeats, these images and the rhythms of their apprehension would foster interpersonalism by affecting identically the poet and his audience. Without necessarily accepting the racial memories of either Yeats or Bly, Wright works to reveal those elements of reality that transcend verification by refusing to submit their intrinsic or significant value to will. Wright begins by muting those elements of value he imposes through tradition, myth, rhyme, meter, stanza, and poem pattern, hoping by the muting to unlock the truths of his own feelings, experiences, and language and achieve illumination and valid poetic epiphany. The basis of this illumination and epiphany is ontological mystery—that immediacy defying the reduction of its elements to an object. In “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” Wright examples this mystery in allowing nature to persist without his imposing any reason. No amount of problem-solving or testing can explain its being, and he has wasted years of his life searching for some rational purpose. Paralleling his illumination, the poem's horse droppings “blaze up” alchemically “into golden stones.” By personifying nature, “Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium” repeats this refusal to turn “other” into “it.” Wright's comparative and literary approach becomes immediate, observational, and widely embracing in its efforts to harmonize inner and outer experience.

A dialectic emerges which is rooted in vertical, upper and lower responses rather than in a divided horizontality like Yeats's rocks and rivers and trees and wind. This verticality opens Wright's poetry to psychological interpretation, though in keeping with Horace's advice, Wright continues to rely as much on disjunction as on primordial or excessively surreal images. Surreal images are unquestionably present in poems like “The Jewel,” “In the Face of Hatred,” “Two Poems about President Harding,” “The Undermining of the Defense Economy,” “Mary Bly,” and “Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon: Christmas, 1960.” One encounters bones turning “to dark emeralds,” “the hallway / Of a dark leaf,” “snowfall / Turned to white stallions,” “Girls the color of butterflies / That can't be sold,” infants “braiding the waters of air into the plaited manes / Of happy colts,” and nature “walking down hallways / Of a diamond.” But as often, one meets an expected leap or gap which, as in “In the Cold House,” forces one to explain why images appear to be at appropriate distances:

I slept a few minutes ago,
Even though the stove has been out for hours.
I am growing old.
A bird cries in bare elder trees.

Clearly the poem connects verbally. “Being out” of things is a common synonym for “sleep,” and “hours” and “elders” reinforce “minutes” and “old.” But there is something more than just word-play at work. A strategic ‘I” locates both outer images, one of which—the stove—is technological, the other of which—a bird—is natural. If technology echoes man, nature does not, for elder trees are not attributes of birds the same way that age is an attribute of the speaker. The deliberate exclusion of discursive reasoning which would give formal voice to this idea and fill the gaps between images—here as in other poems—accounts for the necessity of a long, explanatory title.

The Ohio poems of the volume are among the most conservative. As in earlier books, the townspeople never make it beyond survival into man's higher destinies. They succumb to drink or dream or animalistic satisfactions (“Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”); or they are consumed by fantasy and suicide or worn out or killed by work (“Miners” and the Ohio portions of “Two Hangovers”). In “A Message Hidden in an Empty Wine Bottle That I Threw into a Gulley of Maple Trees One Night at an Indecent Hour,” Wright joins these towns-people, having tried to escape their fate by moving to Seattle and then Minneapolis. Redemption remains as distant as it was in The Green Wall, though in the ghosts and mysteries and suggestions of a spiritual realm that “In Ohio” and “Twilights” contain, Wright leaves room in the imagination for a Saviour. The material world appears by the desertion of deity to be itself deserted. Malice continues in “Two Poems about President Harding”—“Whatever moon and rain may be, / The hearts of men are merciless”—as well as in the glimpse that “How My Fever Left” offers of his parents. His mother swears at her dishes and carries a basket “crooked with hatred.” Calling after her, the father brands her “the old bat.” In “Stages on a Journey Westward,” Wright softens this malice into gentleness as a preface to compassion, but the basic question surrounding the absence of divinity persists. In the absence of joy, love, light, certitude, peace, and help for pain, how can creatures be true to one another?

The volume's poems on Minnesota show a resolve to put past problems behind and wed poetry and present reality. The poems detail events immediate to the poet's life in and about Minneapolis, and in their locating correlatives for emotion in unsung nature, they continue the direction that “The Morality of Poetry” began. Some of the briefer pieces, like “In Fear of Harvest” and “The Jewel,” end impersonally in objects. Others, like “As I Step over a Puddle at the End of Winter, I Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor,” “Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium,” and “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” end in personal questions or evaluations: “Look: I am nothing. / I do not even have ashes to rub into my eyes.” At times, as in “Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me,” a genuine rapport with nature occurs: “I want to hear them, they have clear sounds to make. / Then lovely, far off, a dark cricket begins / In the maple trees.” But Wright is again no closer than he was in his earlier volumes to viewing natural phenomena as anything but idea. However much he seems to merge and interact with the objects he describes, he remains a poet of will, and this makes the places he composes and the specifics of his images arbitrary and, therefore, “aesthetic.” In a variation on Kierkegaard's definition of aesthetic choice as determinations made only for the moment and alterable in a next, Wright rhymes any emotion with any thing and at the next moment with something completely different. The effect is certainly one of novelty, variety, and possibility, but it is also one of confusion, and an astute reader may ask, what more lasting than chance or immediacy does the poetry aim for?

Positive responses to the volume come generally from readers who see Wright's abandonment of literary fathers and echoes and move toward direct observation as a breakthrough for his own voice and values. As one critic noted, “What prevented the natural speech from coming free was a nest of syntax in which the speech became hopelessly entangled.” By jettisoning this syntax and its “discursive reasoning,” the poet is now able to speak “honestly,” to remove the “cotton-wool” that not only made lines seem “literary” but also clouded images. Working from image to image by means of association, poems take on an immediate and particular active consciousness that is liberating and as autobiographical as detail in confessional poetry. A second critic, John Logan, noted the stylistic changes as symptomatic of the poet's growth, though he found Wright at times “actually tied too much to the outer world.” “Growth” in this instance, seems to equate to the poet's confidence and ease in dealing inventively with his own emotions and experiences. Still other readers found some reason to believe that in Wright's optimistic unions with nature, the pessimism of the early collections might be at an end. Peter Stitt, for example, takes heart in the “clear sound” of the grasshoppers in “Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me.” For Stitt, who forgets “the dark cricket,” nature gives Wright “sustenance, acceptance, resurrection, [and] even pronounces a benediction upon him.” That this support is unpredictable and often momentary and might dissipate and open Wright to even deeper fits of depression seems for the moment not to be a consideration. Nor, too, is Wright's continued longing for “another birth.”

IV

Shall We Gather at the River (1968) represents a consolidation of some of the changes that begin in The Branch Will Not Break as well as a return to the pessimism that dominated Saint Judas. In such works as “Poems to a Brown Cricket,” “The Small Blue Heron,” “The Minneapolis Poem,” “Three Sentences for a Dead Swan,” and “A Prayer to the Lord Ramakhrishna,” Wright continues his ventures into song and song cycle as well as into larger and freer musical forms. He also moves more deeply into politics and surrealism in pieces like “The Minneapolis Poem,” where “A cop's palm / Is a roach dangling down the scorched fangs / Of a light bulb.” Once again readers can expect to encounter sympathy for the plight of “the unnamed poor,” the un-unionized laborer, and the various social outsiders who submit to social, institutional, and legal judgment. The hearts of men remain “merciless,” and by his own admission, Wright acknowledges “flat defeat … in a flat voice.” Reasons for the defeat may be supplied in events like the assassination of John F. Kennedy, public resistance to civil rights issues, the murders of activist blacks, urban rioting, and America's involvement in Vietnam. But there are also collapses in Wright's own life: the end of his first marriage, separation from his sons, illness, his being let go by the University of Minnesota, the death of Jenny, and a general inability to get his life reorganized and going again. In attaching his emotions to objects in The Branch Will Not Break, clearly Wright had not counted sufficiently on the effects of time. Unlike those “remembered things” that for Lowell become “rocklike, each in its place,” the objects that Wright chose withered or changed or went painfully slipping away, and with their departures, Wright's world was again unstable.

The “river” of the volume's title comes to convey not only “destructive” time and “consciousness” but variously the Ohio (“A Christmas Greeting”), the Mississippi (“The Minneapolis Poem”), the Red (“To Flood Stage Again”), the Jordan (“An Elegy for the Poet Morgan Blum”), the Styx (“In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia Has Been Condemned”), and either the East or Hudson (“To the Poets in New York”). It returns and erodes fixed objects as well as offers oblivion. By slipping into and becoming it, one can for a time abandon the desire for immortality and seek out the father of one's agony before a police come to remove the remains and, by daybreak, turn them in. From its suckholes, both Hobie Johnson, a friend of the poet's youth, and Jenny, the love of the volume, emerge. On its banks occurred “the old loneliness” that “Two Postures beside a Fire” binds to the poet's youth in Martins Ferry. Into its depths, Charlie pitches himself in the opening poem, “A Christmas Greeting,” and the poet threatens to dive in the closing “To the Muse.” Signalling an end of the American dream that echoes Arnold's collapse of religion, the rivers that have been part of the country's expansion and growth appear a far cry from the river of the hymn that Wright's title recalls. The “escape” that the Mississippi once allowed Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Jim is no longer possible. “Whitman our countryman / Is now in America our country / Dead,” and like the stalled Dante of the Commedia, Wright must await a superhuman or supernationalistic force to carry him farther:

I want to be lifted up
By some great white bird unknown to the police,
And soar for a thousand miles and be carefully hidden
Modest and golden as one last corn grain,
Stored with the secrets of the wheat and the mysterious lives
Of the unnamed poor.

To reflect and offset the changing natures of the river, Wright turns the various and shifting speakers of Shall We Gather at the River into the most consistent of his personae. The nine poems following “A Christmas Greeting” identify the speaker—whatever their particular individual identities—as an outsider living close to bottom. The next nine poems record this outsider's efforts to escape his situation and supply in the process a summary of those events which brought him to where he is. By far, some of the scariest poems occur in the early section, as the speakers find themselves in a drunk tank (“Inscription for the Tank”), destitute (“In Terror of Hospital Bills”), desperately risking (“Gambling in Stateline, Nevada”). and fearing the desolation of old age (“Old Age Compensation”) or discovery (“Before a Cashier's Window in a Department Store”). By the volume's close, some of the threat has subsided. Though still not particularly enamored of Martins Ferry, Wright finds his father supportive, “proud of [the poet], believing / [He has] done strong things among men and become a man / Of place among men of place in the large cities,” his face scarred by “the lines / Of an ugly age.” Again, compassion offers opposition to the book's malice and despair. The consistency of the persona is not, however, framed by the ability of ethical choice to choose consistently or even by an odd quirk of aesthetic choice: It is forced upon the speakers by the narrowness of their present possibilities; ethics becomes economic.

Despite its overall pessimism, the volume makes several inroads into positing and accepting deity. “An Elegy for the Poet Morgan Blum,” for instance, speaks of a King “Where the dead rise / On the other shore.” “Speak” addresses the Lord, saying that Wright has loved His “cursed, / The beauty of [His] house,” bidding deity to “Come down” and reveal himself. “The Light in the Hallway” records a second “longing / For the red spider who is God,” and “A Prayer to the Lord Ramakhrishna” speaks of “the anguish of a naked body” being “more terrible / To bear than God.” But it is a god whose order Wright still has trouble accepting and whose orthodox postures have been assumed by J. Edgar Hoover (“Confession to J. Edgar Hoover”) and a concentration camp truck driver (“The Small Blue Heron”). Wright's discovery in both “Inscription for the Tank” and “In Terror of Hospital Bills” that “Life was never so precious / To [him] as now” prompts, nonetheless, an assumption that, much as out of the existentialist decision not to commit suicide, out of this sense of preciousness will come a strengthening responsibility for his own and others' individuality. Exercising the freedom which characterizes responsibility makes “man like God,” and in rejecting blind will for the discovery of others in his projections of himself, coincidences of “what is” and “what should be” can occur. If one does not rediscover in these coincidences the same norms of honesty, progress, and humanity that existed in religion, then one may discover some basis for the loyalty that Arnold's “Dover Beach” makes his answer to the dreams, struggle, flight, and clashing, ignorant armies.