James Wright (poet) Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Richard Howard

Critical Essay by Richard Howard

[The poems in Wright's To A Blossoming Pear Tree are concerned with the] mythology of the insulted and injured to be located alike in southern Ohio and in the poet's body ("helpless and miserable / dreaming itself / into an apparition of loneliness"). And they exploit that mythology with the insolence of utter conviction. But so deeply is the poet identified with something which has happened to him outside the poem that he cannot be bothered, or even begged, to make it into a coherence within the poem…. The divine event is a deja vu; it is, it has always been, as Wright says, "a secret of blossoms we had no business / to understand, only to remember." (One figures here is the source of Wright's new apostrophe, the object of his attentions and the subject of his askesis: blossoming.) Hence there is a particular stimmung (he has translated Theodor...
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