SOURCE: “The Art of Poetry XLI: Charles Wright,” in Paris Review, Vol. 31, No. 113, Winter, 1989, pp. 185-221.

In the following interview, Wright discusses his introduction to poetry and formative years, his artistic development and aesthetic concerns, and his approach to composing poetry.

From his dust-jacket photographs, you might expect Charles Wright to be a dour man. In person, though, he gives a quite different impression—trim, elegant even in blue jeans, generous, with a Southerner's soft-spoken courtliness. Born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, in 1935, he grew up in the South and went to college there. And a few years ago, after a long spell of teaching at the University of California at Irvine, he returned to the South, as poet-in-residence at the University of Virginia.

Wright's work stands out among his generation of poets for the austere luxuriance of its textures, its mingling of domestic subjects and foreign methods, and...