What is the justification for calling Judas a “saint”?

What does James Wright’s poetry gain from his abandonment of the formal stanzas, meter, and rhyme that he employed in his early poems?

What compensations do Wright’s afflicted characters receive in return for their troubles?

In Wright’s “A Blessing,” what is the blessing? What does the phrase “break into blossom” at the end of the poem signify?

How do individual poems of The Branch Will Not Break fulfill that suggestive title?

Find examples of Wright’s precise observations of external nature.

Although his fame rests almost exclusively with his original poetry, James Wright made a valuable contribution in one other area of literary modernism—the translation. Ezra Pound insisted that translation was in itself an art of the highest creative order, and Wright (especially while he was collaborating with Robert Bly) brought the works of many distinguished European and Latin American authors to readers of English. Wright’s translations for Bly’s Sixties Press included poems by Georg Trakl, César Vallejo, and Pablo Neruda. Wright also translated Hermann Hesse’s Poems (1970), and, in collaboration with his son Franz Paul Wright, Hesse’s Wandering (1972). In addition, he translated Theodor Storm’s The Rider on the White Horse, and Selected Stories (1964), as well as individual poems of several Latin American poets of the twentieth century.

James Wright was widely honored in literary and academic circles, and his Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972. Before his graduation from Kenyon College in 1952, Wright was awarded with the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Prize. He won a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1959, the Ohioana Book Award for Poetry in 1960, and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1971. Wright received a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Vienna, Austria, where he studied the fiction of Theodor Storm. In his experiments with Deep Image poetry, Wright explored alternatives to the strict rhetoric by which Robert Lowell and his followers created one version of the confessional mode of postmodern poetry. His work with this style led James Dickey to call him “one of the few authentic visionary poets writing today.”