SOURCE: Peter Stitt, “James Wright: The Garden and the Grime,” The Kenyon Review, New Series VI, No. 2, Spring, 1984, pp. 76-91.

In the following essay, Stitt examines the importance of the quest motif in Wright's poetry, and identifies it as a quest for a death in which what is dark and burdensome is transformed into light.

James Wright is perhaps the most “questing” of all contemporary poets; there is in his poems a general feeling of dissatisfaction with where he is at the present time and a corresponding desire to be somewhere else. This questing impulse is evident both within the work taken as a whole and within the separate volumes of poetry, where smaller and self-contained versions of the larger quest are undertaken. In this essay, I will discuss the overall pattern while concentrating on what happens in two individual volumes, Shall We Gather at the River (treated...