society, wrote him a commendatory note, and had copies sent to the dean of students and to Wright’s department chair. What had touched the poet was not just the administrative act itself, though it was kind enough, but the context of the previous six years of what Wright perceived as neglect at the University of Minnesota, where he had been denied tenure. So necessary is the May 28 explanation to the March 13 thank you that, at the very least, a cross-reference should have been made for the reader who has no intention of reading this volume as a linear narrative.

Wright’s letters were not written with an eye toward publication, which gives them a stark, sometimes startling intimacy and brutal honesty. “Brutally honest” is a cliché, but it is the right cliché, which Wright may have approved. He came to know the brute part of himself, what philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called the Dionysian (though Wright identified Nietzsche as a “German poet”). Wright knew the beast, and did not flinch in its presence. Yet sometimes the honesty of these letters is almost painful, not just because they reveal uncomfortable truths, which they sometimes do (such as his nervous breakdown at age fifteen, recalled at age thirty; the disintegration of his first marriage; several outbreaks of his catathymic depression; his angry and obscene blowup with James Dickey after a bad review), but also because they exemplify one of the most pandemic diseases of twentieth century writers: self-consciousness. Even in business and personal correspondence, Wright is a conscious craftsman, struggling to master a form, even when that form is the personal letter. The downside of that struggle is that some letters become solipsistic, infinite-regress letters about writing letters. The advantage, however, is that in the process Wright reveals some of the secrets wrested from that struggle, secrets about the nature of the personal letter in particular, and English prose in general, in what may be the last generation of American letter writers.

The notion that letters such as Wright’s are no longer possible in the age of e-mail is entertained in Maley’s introduction and elaborated by David Orr in his New York Times review of A Wild Perfection. The death of the personal letter, however, was similarly predicted with the advent of the telegraph, the technology of which did, indeed, influence English prose style (the staccato rhythms and short sentences dictated by the sheer cost per word led to a style still sometimes called “telegraphic”). If letters such as those of James Wright are never seen again, it is because there will never be another James Wright. It has nothing to do with the technology of the typewriter, or pen and ink.

Or perhaps, in one respect, it does. The aforementioned self-consciousness of Wright’s letters extends to an awareness of the physical medium in which he wrote, and Wright felt a difference between the pen in which he first drafted his poems and the typewriter with which he hammered them into shape. To poet and editor Donald Hall, Wright said the following in March of 1956, a paragraph which makes no sense unless one understands his distinction between writing and typing:I know I haven’t sent you anything new for a while. To tell the truth, I haven’t even typed much, though I’ve been writing like hell, mostly stuff that isn’t coming off. I can’t say that I feel barrenfar from it. But I’m going through some odd stage in which changes, which I don’t understand, are taking place. I don’t want to sound like Letters to a Young Poet, but it’s the truth.

Many writers have left records of those agonizing failures of inspiration, but that is not what is going on here. The muse on March 22, 1956, was sending Wright all he could handle, but the angel of revision, the goddess of editing, seemed unavailable. The form, which Wright always expressed as something external to the poet, would not come.

Wright’s struggles with poetic form, which A Wild Perfection details admirably, were the struggles of his generation of poets, the post-1945 poets who made that bizarre compound “postmodernist” necessary in American letters. In a lifelong dialogue with Robert Bly, whose war against the iamb in English-language poetry he joined with reservations, Wright played the role of a French neoclassic raisonneur. Genuinely grateful for what he considered Bly’s tutelage, Wright nevertheless feared that Bly’s extremism on the issue of poetic meter would blunt or waste his powers. Furthermore, as he wrote to Louis Simpson (while congratulating him for winning the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for poetry), “there isn’t enough strict iambic verse in the English language to bother resisting; anyway, Wyatt already resisted it.” That is, the moment iambic pentameter was established as the “natural” English verse form, in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s translation of book 4 of Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553), it was already doomed.

Wright’s quarter-century conversation with James Dickey is similarly precarious, especially as it began with a July 6, 1958, blast against Dickey, ostensibly because a review of Dickey’s had slighted Philip Booth but manifestly also because it had slighted Wright’s poetry. Wright’s immediate retraction, his temporary “resignation” as a poet, a few weekends of rest at Bly’s farm, all unfold alongside a growing respectful interchange with Dickey. The editors present the original offending letter in its entirety and do not edit out Wright’s stumbling over his apologies in the next few letters to Dickey. Avoiding both sensationalism and Bowdlerization, A Wild Perfection reveals both the ugliest and the most beautiful elements of Wright.

The index of the book is a marvel of detail, yet it is not exhaustive. It seems to have been prosecuted in the unwarranted assumption that the only readers of Wright’s letters would be devotees of American poetry. A great number of proper nouns appear in Wright’s letters that do not show up in the index. It is clear from Wright’s letters that he had at least a passing interest in college footballbut a reader could not tell that from the index. Surely the only reason that baseball great Dizzy Dean is indexed is that Wright wrote an elegy for Dean’s death in 1974, which appears in an appendix of unpublished poems at the end of the volume.

That appendix itself is worth the price of the book. Jonathan Blunk has carefully selected all the poems to which Wright specifically refers in his letters. They appear in the form in which they then existed. Many are unpublished, and those that were published later appear here in earlier incarnations.

Wright, despite his anguished lashings of self-hatred and occasional erosions of will (mostly thanks to alcoholism, which he was able to stave off in the last decade of his life), was a deeply humane presence in American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, and A Wild Perfection admirably captures the personal and intellectual charism that made his loyal friendsthemselves major figures in American letterslove him as fiercely as he loved life, America, and poetry.