Alienation in James Wright’s Poetry
Transcript of Alienation in James Wright’s Poetry
Ministry of Higher Education And Scientific Research University of Al-Qadissiya College of Education Department of English
Alienation in James Wright’s Poetry Submitted By: Ali Muhsen Hussein Azzuz
Sanaa Hashim Supervised By:
Asst. Lect. Hawraa Fadil
Dedication
To our dear parents for their patience ,understanding and support.
ii
Acknowledgements
This success would not be achieved without, guidance,
advice, help and encouragement from our supervisor Asst. Lect.
Hawraa Fadil who supports us to finish this paper.
iii
Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Contents iv
Abstract v
Chapter One
1.1 James Wright’s Life and Career 1
2.3 Alienation In Literature 6
Notes 10
Chapter Two
Alienation in James Wright’s 12
“Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”
Notes 18
Chapter Three
Alienation in James Wright’s “A Blessing” 19
Notes 22
Conclusion 23
Bibliography 24
iv
Abstract
Until recently, any serious reader of American poetry could have named,
perhaps even recited, a handful of poems by James Wright. They would most
likely be from such as “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio and “A Blessing,
which represent the fertile meeting ground of two powerful currents in midcentury
American poetry.
This paper consists of three chapters. chapter one fauces on James Wright’s
life and career and alienation in literature . Chapter two discusses Alienation in
James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”, while chapter three
discusses Alienation in Wright’s “A Blessing.”
Finally ,the conclusion sums up the findings of this paper.
V
Chapter One
1.1 James Wright’s Life and Career
Wright is an American poet and translator. His poetry has gradually evolved
in style from traditional to experimental verse, consistently reflecting strong lyric
grace. Considered by many critics to be one of the finest poets writing in America
today, Wright received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1972.1
On December 13, 1927, James Arlington Wright was born in Martins Ferry,
Ohio. While in high school in 1943 Wright suffered a nervous breakdown and
missed a year of school. When he graduated in 1946, a year late, he joined the
army and was stationed in Japan during the American occupation. He then attended
Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill, and studied under John Crowe Ransom. He in
married 1952. The two traveled to Austria, where, on a Fulbright Fellowship,
Wright studied the works of Theodor Storm and Georg Trakl at the University of
Vienna. He returned to the U.S. and earned master’s and doctoral degrees at the
University of Washington, studying with Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz.
He went on to teach at The University of Minnesota, Macalester College, and New
York City’s Hunter College.2
The poverty and human suffering Wright witnessed as a child profoundly
influenced his writing and he used his poetry as a mode to discuss his political and
social concerns. He modeled his work after Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost,
whose engagement with profound human issues and emotions he admired. The
subjects of Wright’s earlier books, The Green Wall (1957)and Saint Judas (1959),
include men and women who have lost love or have been marginalized from
society for such reasons as poverty and sexual orientation, and they invite the
reader to step in and experience the pain of their isolation. 3
Wright possessed the ability to reinvent his writing style at will, moving
easily from stage to stage. His earlier work adheres to conventional systems of
meter and stanza, while his later work exhibits more open, looser forms, as with
The Branch Will Not Break (1963). James Wright was elected a fellow of the
Academy of American Poets in 1971, and the following year his Collected Poems
received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. He died in New York City on March 25,
1980.4
Wright's early poetry is relatively conventional in form and meter, especially
compared with his later, looser poetry. Although most of his fame comes from his
original poetry, Wright made a contribution to another area or literary modernism-
the translation. His work with translations of German and South American poets,
as well as the poetry and aesthetic position of Robert Bly, had considerable
influence on his own poems; this is most evident in The Branch Will Not Break,
which departs radically from the formal style of Wright's previous book, Saint
Judas. In addition to his own poetry, he also published loose translations of René
Char's hermetic poems.5
His poetry often deals with people who deprive of the right to vote, or the
American outsider. Wright suffered from depression and unstable mood disorders
and also he Addicted to Alcohol his entire life. He experienced several nervous
breakdowns, was hospitalized, and was subjected to electroshock therapy. His dark
moods and focus on emotional suffering were part of his life and often the focus of
his poetry, although given the emotional disorder he experienced personally, his
poems can be optimistic in expressing a faith in life and human distinction. In The
Branch Will Not Break, the enduring human spirit becomes thematic .6
Technically, Wright was an innovator, especially in the use of his titles, first
lines, and last lines, which he used to great dramatic effect in defense of the lives
of the with people who deprive of the right to vote. He is equally well known for
his tender depictions of the bleak landscapes of the post-industrial American
Midwest. Since his death, Wright has developed a cult following, transforming him
into a seminal writer of significant influence. Hundreds of writers gathered
annually for decades following his death to pay tribute at the James Wright Poetry
Festival held from 1981 through 2007 in Martins Ferry .7
Wright proceeded through three rather distinct phases in his poetic career, in
all of which he produced work so commendable that he is considered one of the
half-dozen best poets of his generation. He is also one of a few poets to have
gathered a kind of popular following. For several years after his death, a group of
devotees met annually in Martins Ferry on the anniversary to hold a memorial
reading and reminisce about Wright’s life and work .8
James Wright wrote contemplative, sturdy, and generous poems with an
honesty, clarity, and stylistic range matched by very few--then or now. From his
Deep Image-inspired lyrics to his Whtimanesque renderings of Neruda, Vallejo,
and other Latin American poets, and from his heartfelt reflections on life, love, and
loss in his native Ohio to the celebrated prose poems (set frequently in Italy) that
marked the end of his important career, Above the River gathers the complete
work of a modern master. It also features a moving and insightful introduction by
Donald Hall, Wright's longtime friend and colleague .9
number of Wright poems touch on persons or events and are conceived in
the same terms of intimate acquaintance and objective existence. Though he
closely scrutinizes his experience, Wright never tries to maneuver it for his own
purposes. Frequently he pauses to study the most ordinary things which his
imagination then lifts from the limbo of the routine and unworthy in the at tempt to
find out the meanings lying dormant in them. Everything has its shadow, its hidden
life, disclosed by the poet .10
At present, the criticism of James Wright's poetry lives mainly in reviews
and a few essays, several of which contain more than a nugget or two of insight.
These writings deal with a poet still at work and, thus, are confined to discussions
of his latest books, or to the relation of new work to previous work .11
American mainstream poetry after the 1950s has often been categorized as
neo-Romantic, since the general poetic stance resides basically on a dualism
between the Subject which means the human consciousness and the nature.
However, with poets like Wright constantly preoccupied with self-acceptance,
which comes from a deeper understanding of and immersion into nature, this
dualism becomes more than simply a relationship.12
While the speaker of Wright’s poems is often constricted by a preoccupation
with inner self, he often recognizes and laments the transformation of the natural
landscape that results from the industrial culture of his hometown. Although he left
his home region of the upper Ohio Valley early in his life, Wright’s poetry
illustrates how the memory of and experience in one’s native landscapes provide a
way of perceiving and processing all other experience and places thereafter. While
much scholarship has noted the questing aspect of Wright’s body of work, and
although his pursuit of education and his writing career led him Westward and
overseas to Italy, Ohio is a constant presence in his work. And while scholars have
also noted Wright’s self-admitted ambivalent relationship with his native Ohio, his
representations of the region symbolically transform the landscape into depictions
that effectively critique the culture of small-town industrial America.13
At the same time, Wright recognizes the part of himself that is eternally
rooted in the small river town of Martins Ferry, Ohio. That sense of rootedness
results from the connection between place, the culture that inhabits it, and the
meaningful experiences one has within it. Wright’s Ohio poems clearly illustrate
the way in which poetic place representations symbolically reconstruct landscapes
into cultural critiques that raise the reader’s consciousness toward the interaction
between human culture and place.14
To this end, Wright’s recollected landscapes address several aspects of the
landscape mode, specifically the relationship between external and internal
landscapes, identity, and the subjective processing of place. Across the body of
Wright’s work, his landscape depictions generally fall into one of two categories:
pastoral landscapes of immediacy, and recollections of the landscapes of home.
The poems of immediacy tend to describe the immediate and present effect of the
landscape on the speaker as the poem generally moves from a description of the
external world to the internal.15
2.1 Alienation In Literature
Alienation is the basic form of rootlessness, which forms the subject of
many psychological, sociological, literary and philosophical studies. Alienation is
a major theme of human condition in the contemporary epoch. It is only natural
that a pervasive phenomenon like alienation should leave such an indelible impact
upon the contemporary literature. Alienation emerges as natural consequence of
existential predicament both in intrinsic and extrinsic terms .21
The theme of alienation has been variously dealt with persistently and
unflinchingly in modern literature. The alienated protagonist is a recurrent figure in
much of the twentieth century American and European fiction. Alienation in its
various forms, has been dealt with in the existentialistic literature. Owing to its
historical and socio-cultural reasons, the Indo-English literature also, could not
remain unaffected by it. Alienation is the result of loss of identity. The
dispossessed personality's search for identity is a common place theme in modern
fiction .21
Alienation is a common theme in literature as it can elicit many deep
emotions. It can be attached to characters who have acted very drastically or who
need to do so. Either way, alienated characters create a sense of intrigue with the
personal reliance that they are faced with. Receiving help from others is not as
applicable to these people. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, “The Minister’s Black Veil,”
Anne Sexton’s, “The Farmer’s Wife,” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock” each magnificently create their own sense of character alienation
.18
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, “The Minister’s Black Veil,” the story is told of
the isolation of a man draped with a black veil over his face. At the beginning
when the minister, Mr. Hooper, and his veil first appeared in church, it took only a
few seconds for the townspeople to describe Hooper in censorious terms such as
mad and awful. He was not asked any questions to explain himself. Rather, these
people turned on him immediately and were convinced that the veil was hiding
something. The veil being black symbolizes a sense of mystery and darkness in the
minister. Hawthorne described how the veil was like that of a sinful secret between
Hooper and the townspeople .19
This secret was never revealed, which only further alienated Hooper.
Despite the astonishment others felt towards him, Mr. Hooper acted very casually
and did not seem to notice the fear of the churchgoers. After the services, Hooper
greeted the churchgoers as he usually would by paying respects to the elderly and
putting his hand on children’s heads. These indiscreet actions in no way relieved
the feelings toward Hooper. Hawthorne, though, stated that maybe the
congregation was as fearful to Hooper as he was to them .20
Alienation emerges as natural consequences of existential predicament. It is
necessary to understand the meaning of existentialism. Existentialism is not a well
organized and systematic philosophy of life nor can its beginning be pinpointed.
Jean Wahl considers existentialism as “Philosophies of existence”. It is also
considered as a sharp reaction of all forms of rationalism. Kierkegaard reacted
against Hegelian idealism. Marcel reacted against the idealist like F.H. Bradley and
Brunschvieg. Another important point to be discussed is the dictum that the
existentialists set forth existence precedes essence. They asserted that man first of
all exists and then only he thinks of it .32
Not surprisingly, Wright's estrangement from history and home parallels the
relentless loneliness pervading his work. As he undergoes changes in his
orientation toward history and home, so does he transcend this loneliness. But this
change involves much more. For Wright, loneliness is the basic fact of things, of
being. The limitations of the physical body exacerbate this condition. Though a
source of delight, the body ultimately separates one human spirit from another. It
reminds one of mortality and cosmic aloneness. Thus Wright moves between a
dedication to the facts of the physical body and a desire to transcend the body. He
also vacillates between the need for a personal, almost confessional, relationship
with the reader and the opposing wish to withdraw and have both writer and
reader. 22
Though Wright never resolves these conflicts, he comes to praise the
intractable uniqueness of each life. His metaphysical loneliness eventually wanes
under the influence of a happy love relationship; in his final book, a consoling aura
of "solitude" supplants his lonel iness One need not look far into Wright's poetry to
find examples of loneliness and the limitations of the body. Reading Wright’s work
within the framework of the landscape mode, specifically noting the exchange
between internal and external and the transformation of place into symbolic and
metaphoric expression, emphasizes these tensions among Wright, his past, present,
and the self-proclaimed “complicated feelings” about the place of his upbringing
surface again and again.23
Notes
1
Saundra Maley, Solitary Apprenticeship: James Wright and German Poetry
(Lewiston, Maine: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996),p.43.
2 Ibid.
3 David C. Dougherty , James Wright ( Boston: Twayne, 1987,)p.8.
4 Frank N. Magill, “Critical Survey of Poetry.” Vol. 8. Pasadena: Salem,
1992,p.13.
5 Ibid.
6 Robert Bly ,The Work of James Wright. James Wright: The Heart of Light. By
Stitt and Graziano, eds ( Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
2991.)
7 Ibid.
8 Andrew Elkins ,The Poetry of James Wright ( Tuscaloosa: The University of
Alabama Press, 1991,)p.54.
9 Ibid,p.55.
10 Mary Ruby and Ira Mark Milne, Poetry for Students Farmington :The Gale
Group Hills,2000),p.16.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid,p.17.
13 William Scott Hanna, In Search of the Self, In Search of the Land: Toward a
Contemporary American Poetics of Place ( Pennsylvania: Indiana University Press
2012),p.33.
14 Ibid.
15 Dave Smith, “James Wright: The Pure Clear World, an Interview.” The Pure
Clear World: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright. Chicago: Illinois University
Press , 1982),p.45.
16 Ibid.
17 G.A. Nettler ,A Measure of Alienation ,Middletown: Wesleyan University Press ,
2991,) p.71.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid,p.51.
20 Crane R.S .The Humanities ( Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1967,)p.6.
21 Ibid.
22 Karen Horney :Our Inner Conflicts ( London: Routledge of Kegan Paul.
1946,)p.14.
23 Mary Ruby and Ira Mark Milne,p.19
Chapter Two
Alienation in James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”
The first two words of the second line in “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry,
Ohio” denote a subtle theme in the poem that becomes more visible as we read
more of James Wright’s work. Alienation from his own environment appears often
in his poems, usually taking the form of the narrator as an observer, not a
participant, in the poem’s action.1
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Titonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of Heroes.2
The words “I think” at the beginning of the line set the narrator apart from
his surroundings. He thinks of the factory and steel mill workers who sit around
him watching their sons play football, but he is not one of them. He does not
mention an personal connection to the game, nor is he one of the “proud fathers …
ashamed to go home.” Instead, he very poignantly states, ”Their women cluck … ”
and ”Their sons grow suicidally beautiful….” But although the speaker is
personally unattached to the situation, he is not without empathy for those directly
involved .3
The dismal scene portrayed in the poem would easily include Wright’s own
father who spent 50 years working in a glass factory. With fierce and desperate
determination, the poet escaped the same fate by getting an education and moving
away from Martins Ferry. He intentionally alienated himself from the environment
of his childhood and that of his family. This estrangement is different from that felt
by people who want to fit in, but, for whatever reason, sense that they do not.
Wright’s poem speaks to a self-inflicted separation, sometimes physical and
always psychological .4
James Wright's "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" is a grittily realistic
poem that pits the hopelessness and despair of growing up in a dying factory town
against the seductive futility of the athlete's frantic attempts to transcend his
destiny. Wright begins the poem with the technically correct misnomer, "Shreve
High." While that name is actually engraved in stone above the front doors of his
alma mater, the school itself was never known by any other name than "Martins
Ferry High School." However, by referring to it by its archaic name, Wright is able
to evoke images of another form of the word,. The stark images in the poem have a
penitential aura to them: "fathers (who) are ashamed to go home", and "sons
grow(n) suicidally beautiful" (6). The mention of shame is evocative of a
confessional, and "suicidally beautiful" is an eerie juxtaposition of two normally
very disparate words .5
The first stanza contains words and phrases associated with destruction and
debilitation: "gray faces," "blast furnace," "ruptured." The futility of the
immigrants "nursing long beers in Tiltonsville" (2), perhaps after a long swing shift
at Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel mill, draws attention to the rampant problem of
alcoholism amongst factory workers in the Ohio Valley. The town of Tiltonsville,
approximately seven miles upriver from Martins Ferry, is even tinier than the town
of Ferry itself, and at the time of the poem's publication (and even today), the
majority of the town's population descends from Italian, Polish and Greek
immigrants. In 1963 ,when Wright published the poem, these factory workers were
likely first generation Americans with little or no education or hopes of getting
one. For these immigrants, the factory jobs represented an opportunity to seize the
American dream.6
In "I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville" (2), Wright is able
to convey that these simple immigrants are able to perceive the dichotomy that
their salvation coexists within their damnation. That which saves them from a life
of abject poverty and want also condemns them to a blue collar existence, because
they haven't acquired the wealth or knowledge to rise above their stations in life.7
Wrights' reference to "gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at
Benwood" (3) implies that the unnatural grayness of their faces is a result of the
ashes which constantly spew from the giant furnace in the plant across the Ohio
River from Martins Ferry in Benwood, West Virginia. The African-American's
natural hues of café au lait, mahogany, and ebony have been replaced by an
unhealthy gray pallor, as if, over the years, they have ceased to be men and had
instead become part of the machinery they tend. Together with the "ruptured night
watchman of Wheeling Steel" (4), they are "Dreaming of heroes" (5).8
Already broken by life and decades of backbreaking labor, who will be the
heroes for these factory men? Surely they will not rise from their own ranks, for
"All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home" (6), where "Their women cluck
like starved pullets, / Dying for love" (7-8). The fathers know too well what lies
ahead: days and nights of working second and third shifts, coming off the shift at
7:00 a.m. and finding the riverside bars open and waiting for them with icy beers
and strong whiskey, punching the time clock each day and longing to hear the 4:30
whistle call an end to their labor, yet hating to go home to a wife full of wants with
a paycheck already diminished by the gambling pools before they even get to the
factory door. These fathers have set their sights on their sons to be their heroes, to
save them all from a cradle-to-the-grave life of poverty, alcoholism, unpaid debts,
strikes and labor disputes. The son can be the one who got out, who put Martins
Ferry on the map and made them all proud. And football can be his one-way
ticket.9
Wright mentions women in his poem only as an aside, likening them to
"starved pullets, / Dying for love" (7-8). In the game of football, women take on
the secondary role of cheerleader; there is no equivalent sport for them to shine.
Yet these golden, bouncy, hopeful cheerleaders will grow into women, learn
firsthand the disappointments these former gridiron stars are capable of becoming.
One day their boisterous cheers will be reduced to the "cluck" of a "starved pullet"
when they realize that the dream they were sold years ago is made of slag and
ashes, and the love they believed would last forever has turned into an alcoholic,
hazy violence. Yet they, too, will turn out in force at these games, cheering on their
sons, in whose own heads and hearts the dream has been instilled .10
It's no accident that the whole town, indeed the whole Valley, worships the
Friday night football games played in the stadium beside the river. No matter how
long a shift was worked that day, come Friday night, they are there. Doctors,
lawyers, policemen, millworkers, miners, businessmen . . . they all show up to
watch the spectacle. Of course, there are baseball and basketball seasons, but those
don't really count. Only football really matters. Football makes the dynasties,
generations of men with names like Bruney and Suriano, whose granddads and
fathers played and instructed and shouted from the sidelines. Football transforms
pimply-confronted juvenile young men into divine beings for a season, transforms
them into something more wonderful than they have ever moved toward becoming.
These young men know what lies ahead: the mammoth throat of the plant,
prepared to pulverize and disjoin, eating its own with disturbing normality, as
though it needs an unfaltering eating regimen of forfeit to keep it alive; the
immense profundities of the mines and the dark lurched mineworkers with lights
on their protective caps and sediment on their appearances. 11
This future lies ahead if football neglects to be their ticket out. Wright
entwines the inborn solidarity of the expectation and uselessness of experiencing
childhood in a withering steel town with his one-word line, "Therefore" (9). There
is much power in his conclusion; it is the power of predestination. Because the
fathers work so hard for so little that they have nothing left to give to their women
waiting at home for a spare crumb of affection or love, "Their sons grow suicidally
beautiful / At the beginning of October, And gallop terribly against each other's
bodies" (10-12). They will take the abuse of the coaches, running up and down the
stadium steps in the August heat and humidity until they puke, do whatever it takes
to give themselves a shot at escaping the destiny that beckons just over the wall of
the football stadium: the mill. That which gives the town its life also slowly
strangles it, until the industry, like the town itself, dies an economic death.12
Notes
1 Peter Stitt, “James Wright: The Garden and the Grime.” Kenyon Review 6 (1984):
JSTOR, p.4.
2 James Wright, Above the River: The Complete Poems. New York: UP of New
England University Press, 1990),p,45.
3 Peter Stitt,p.6.
4 Ibid.
5 Donald Dean Morrill, Exile's Home: The Poetry of James Wright (Florida: Florida
University Press,1995),p.135.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Dave Smith, The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982),p.34.
9 Ibid,p.35.
10 Ibid.
11 David Dougherty, The Poetry of James Wright ( Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 1991),p.76.
12 Ibid.
Chapter Three
Alienation in James Wright’s “A Blessing”
like many of the nature poems of the English Romantic poets, James
Wright’s “A Blessing” starts with the close noticing of the natural world and
moves across a amazing moment of self-revelation. Consisting of a single stanza of
twenty-four unrhymed lines, the poem begins by declaring its geographic setting
“just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota” and the time of day twilight. The
speaker and his friend watch two Indian ponies emerge from a group of willows
and walk toward them. Then the two humans “step over the barbed wire into the
pasture” and approach the ponies, who show no fear. In fact, not only are the
ponies unafraid, but also, according to the speaker, their eyes are dark “with
kindness,” they come “gladly” forward to “welcome” the two people, and “they
can hardly contain their happiness/ That we have come.” Watching the ponies, the
speaker decides, “They love each other.”1
As the reader progresses there develops a definite sense of anticipation, the
two humans making eye contact with the ponies in the fading light, stepping over
the barbed wire from the human world into the wild world of the ponies .2
They bow shyly as wet swans.
They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.(10-12).”3
Together yet lonely. How can that be? The speaker projects human qualities
onto the ponies, suggesting that these two are in love, yet uniquely lonely. Is this
where metaphor comes in? Are the ponies really humans in the mind of the
speaker, peripheral, lonely, because they're not understood? On the other side of
the barbed wire.4
One of the ponies is singled out because it displays what to the speaker is
affection and comes over to nuzzle the hand, whilst the breeze informs the
speaker's actions and he touches the long ear, which is as soft as girl's wrist. This
second simile (shyly as swans is the first) comes at an opportune time, for we're
nearing the transcendent last few lines of the poem.5
The speaker’s evident pleasure in the ponies and the positive emotions he
ascribes to them seem almost sentimental, but the hint of sentimentality is
undermined at the center of the poem when, just after asserting that the ponies love
each other, the speaker says, “There is no loneliness like theirs.”(12).6
“A Blessing” is a visionary nature poem; it begins with a careful description
of the natural world, with the speaker’s gradual immersion into that world, and
then moves suddenly and unexpectedly to a moment of spiritual revelation. At
first, the speaker is caught up in the mundane world of human activity; he has been
traveling on “the highway to Rochester, Minnesota.” Yet something has caught his
attention, has led him to pull over and to get “off” the highway. He and his friend
have seen the two Indian ponies, and they begin to leave the human world of
highways and cities and enter the natural world, the world from which twenty-first
century Americans are typically estranged. 7
Human alienation from nature is the starting point of this poem, and the
capacity to undo that alienation is its topic. The boundary between the human
world and the natural world is of central concern, and images of crossing
boundaries are frequent. In the second line, for example, the twilight “bounds
softly forth” on the pasture grass, but it would seem that the ponies, and not the
twilight, are doing the bounding forth. Already boundaries are blurring. As the
speaker and his friend “step over the barbed wire” fence and cross into the pasture,
their movement into and participation in the natural world become clearer.8
“A Blessing,” one of Wright's most notable works, describes its theme of
loneliness through the horses who have not been with humans in so long and this
leads to the overwhelming connection these animals share upon meeting Wright
and his friend .9
Notes
1 Keith Walters, "James Wright." Discovering Authors. (Detroit: Gale, 2003).p.78
2 Ibid,p.79.
3 James Wright, The Complete Poems. New York: New England University Press,
1990),p.3.
4 Robert Bly, A Wrong Turning in American Poetry. Claims for Poetry (Ann Arbor:
The University of Michigan Press. 1982),p.21.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid,p.22.
8 Andrew Elkins, The Poetry of James Wright (Tuscaloosa: The University of
Alabama Press, 1991),p.83.
9 Ibid.
Conclusion
After looking through a large portion of James Wright's work one has begun
to pick up a repeated theme of loneliness in many of his poems. Wright uses the
theme of loneliness to connect and latch on his thoughts and ideas to several other
themes that become teamed with that of loneliness. Wright often uses the feeling of
isolation to connect with the reader first and from there grow in a different
direction with them. Wright did not shy away from making the feeling of
loneliness evident as the word itself appears over and over again throughout his
works. Along with the feeling of loneliness many of Wright's poems incorporate
nature in some fashion. He often combines the two together as seen in the
examples below.
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