James Arlington Wright (December 13, 1927 – March 25, 1980) was an American lyric poet in the post-World War II decades. He often wrote about his experience of Depression-era poverty in the Midwest. His Collected Poems won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He then enlisted in the U.S. Army and participated in the occupation of Japan.
Following his discharge from military service, Wright attended Kenyon College on the GI Bill. He studied with John Crowe Ransom, and published poems in the Kenyon Review. Wright graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1952. That same year, he married Liberty Kardules, another Martins Ferry native. He subsequently spent a year in Vienna on a Fulbright Fellowship, returning to the U.S. where he obtained a master's degree and a Ph.D. at the University of Washington; his faculty advisers were the poets Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz.
Wright's transformation did not come by accident, as he had been working for years with his friend Robert Bly, collaborating on the translation of world poets in the influential magazine, The Fifties (later The Sixties).
Poetry
Wright's early poetry is relatively conventional in form and meter, especially compared with his later, looser work. Although most of his fame comes from his own poetry, he was also a prolific translator of other poets. He published translations of René Char's hermetic poems. His translations of modern German and Spanish poets, Throughout his life, he suffered from clinical depression and bipolar mood disorders, and also battled alcoholism. He experienced several nervous breakdowns, was hospitalized, and was subjected to electroshock therapy. While his dark moods and focus on emotional suffering were often at the center of his poetry, his poems could be optimistic, expressing faith in life and human transcendence. In The Branch Will Not Break, the enduring human spirit becomes thematic. Nevertheless, the last line of his poem "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" famously reads, "I have wasted my life."
Technically, Wright was an innovator, especially in the use of his titles, first lines, and last lines, which he employed to great dramatic effect in defense of the marginalized. He is equally well known for his tender depictions of the bleak landscapes of the post-industrial American Midwest.
Awards and legacy
Wright won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his volume Collected Poems (1971).
Besides his various poetry awards, Wright was a recipient of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
After his death, Wright developed a cult following that regarded him as a seminal American poet. Fellow Pulitzer prize winner Mary Oliver wrote "Three Poems for James Wright" upon his death, and hundreds of writers gathered annually to pay tribute at the James Wright Poetry Festival held from 1981 through 2007 in Martins Ferry.
Wright's son Franz was also a poet, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2004. James and Franz are believed to be the first parent/child pair to have won a Pulitzer Prize in the same category.
Works
Published in his lifetime
- The Green Wall (Yale University Press, 1957)
- Saint Judas (Wesleyan University Press, 1959)
- Selected Poems (2005)
- A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright (2005)
- The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright., edited by Anne Wright and Joy Harjo (2009)
See also
- James Wright Poetry Festival
- Deep image