The Washington Post Reviews New James Wright Biography by Jonathan Blunk

Troy Jollimore reviews Jonathan Blunk's new biography of poet James Wright for the Washington Post's Books section. As Jollimore explains, Wright's poetry had a "dynamic energy," the result of his "determination" and "spectacular memory," that made his poems stand out from the rest. Though, that determination at times flagged. As Jollimore puts it: "Wright’s obsession with poetry remained throughout his life, though he frequently considered abandoning it, particularly in the early years of struggle and frustration." From there: 

“By God,” he wrote in a 1947 letter, “I am going to keep myself from writing if I have to tape my fingers and thumbs together.” A decade later, his first book, “The Green Wall,” won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Yet he remained unhappy, both with his own work and with the state of American poetry, which he saw as excessively formal and staid, pervaded by the so-called New Criticism. “I have been depressed as hell,” he wrote Theodore Roethke in 1958. “My stuff stinks, and you know it.” The current situation, he went on to write, was “more than a literary vacuum — this is a catastrophe for human civilization.”

In July of that year, once again on the verge of renouncing his vocation, Wright received a copy of the inaugural issue of the poetry magazine called the Fifties. Robert Bly and William Duffy published the Fifties (later called the Sixties and the Seventies) as a contrarian gesture against what they saw as the culturally isolated and largely lifeless poetry dominating the era’s literary scene, and as a means of reaching poets who felt as alienated and disenchanted as they did.

“The arrival of the Fifties in Wright’s faculty mailbox,” Blunk writes, “threw Wright into a state approaching vertigo.” Tremendously excited, he wrote to Bly, beginning a correspondence that would continue for the rest of his life. The poems presented in the Fifties, and the correspondence with Bly, rekindled his sense of the possibilities of poetry and suggested new directions for his own work — directions that would lead to “The Branch Will Not Break” and on to “Collected Poems” (1971), which won a Pulitzer Prize.

Read on at the Washington Post.