The poet’s mailbox

In July 1958, the poet James Wright, then 31, received an envelope in his mailbox at the University of Minnesota from a still unknown poet and editor named Robert Bly. In the envelope was the first issue of Bly’s poetry magazine, the Fifties, which would delight and exasperate so many Eisenhower-era literati. With its famous opening statement, “The editors of this magazine think that most of the poetry published in America today is too old-fashioned,” its translations of Spanish and South American surrealists, and its cheek, the magazine was a challenge to the prevailing aesthetic, which Wright had followed in his early work.

In Wright’s first letter to Bly, he summed up his reaction like this: “You’ve blasted open in me an abandoned cavern where the sacred mysteries used to be clumsily but reverently celebrated, before I found it was, upon the whole, somewhat more comfortable to be dead.... I’m beginning to think, this evening, that I must have been really suffering with this sense of failure, of betraying what within me I genuinely knew, though I denied it on the surface, what poetry was.”

The 60 letters that Bly dug out of storage in 2003, from which this letter is taken, are a main attraction in this rich volume, “A Wild Perfection,” edited by Wright’s widow, Anne, and Wright scholar Saundra Rose Maley. The letters to Bly, and to contemporaries such as James Dickey, Donald Hall, Anne Sexton and Wright’s graduate school teacher Theodore Roethke, are important in part for the insight they offer into American postwar poetry, of which Wright was a leading figure. The letters in the current volume document the transition so many poets were going through at that time, away from formal distance and toward a loosening up of subject matter and technique.

Starting with his collections “The Branch Will Not Break” (1963) and “Shall We Gather at the River” (1969), Wright published some of the most widely loved poems of the period. He would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for “Collected Poems.” (A volume of Wright’s “Selected Poems” has also just been published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.) At his best, Wright had a knack for memorable images and the surprising epiphanic twist, as in these famous lines from “A Blessing,” which describe his and Bly’s unexpected encounter with a horse by the roadside:

Her mane falls wild on her forehead,

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

It is clear from this volume of letters that Wright approached letter-writing like Keats and Rilke, as a chance to work his craft and stretch his sensibilities. The selection reads like a fragmentary bildungsroman, spanning the years from when Wright was 19, in 1946, until weeks before his death from cancer in 1980. As Maley explains in her introduction, the editors chose letters “for their readability as part of a narrative,” although the narrative is more about Wright’s mental progress than the circumstances of his life.

Wright’s poetry became known for its plain style, but his letters are rife with intellect and learning. He often reflects on authors he is reading or has read, and one is struck by the range of his taste -- Alexander Pope and Pablo Neruda as well as Ivor Winters and Gary Snyder -- a virtue wanting among some of the other poets in Wright’s circle. As he wrote to Bly in February 1960, “I am finding that, for me, any absolute position in the discussion of poetry is a position that something deep inside me instinctively rejects.” This exploratory attitude is evident throughout these letters. Consequently, it’s a book that adds a lot to our appreciation of Wright’s intellect and culture, his “magnitude of mind and spirit,” as Maley puts it.

We get a glimpse of Wright’s thoughts when he was in the Army, having enlisted in part to be eligible for the GI Bill that enabled him to get an excellent education despite his indigent early life in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio (his father worked as a die-cutter at Hazel-Atlas Glass in Wheeling, W.Va., for 50 years). Wright corresponds with former high school teachers and friends back home about his fondness for Catullus and Rilke, self-consciously developing his literary persona. His initial formalist leanings are expressed in a passage from 1949. Poetry, he says, “is not a matter of singing straight off and irresponsibly the surface feelings of one’s consciousness. It is a matter of patiently constructing and rebuilding.”

A letter he writes a short while later, when he is studying under John Crowe Ransom and others in Ohio at that bastion of the New Criticism, Kenyon College, shows that his early classical aesthetic ideal was not simply in emulation of the post-Eliot model. It was part of an inner, emotional need: “My problem has always been how to get out of myself.” It’s interesting to reflect on how Wright eventually found this release from personality in the “romantic,” so-called deep-image poetry (a term Wright himself did not like) that he learned from surrealists such as Georg Trakl and Neruda. Like most of his contemporaries, he would come to write in a conversational, idiomatic free verse. But Wright was never a confessional writer, like his University of Minnesota colleague John Berryman, even though his alcoholism, marital problems and struggles with manic-depression fully qualified him for the job. Instead, Wright sought subject matter -- nature, the lives of working people or social outcasts -- that was outside his own life and tried to reconcile suffering with a vision of the beautiful.

Wright moved from Minnesota to New York and started teaching at Hunter College in 1965. He married Anne, his second wife, in 1967, and started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in 1974. The biographical outline corresponds to an increasing tone of self-acceptance. He is more relaxed and happy. There is a brief spell of letters in this period where I found myself missing the angst and edge of Wright’s Minnesota days. (One of his best qualities, in his poetry as well as his prose, is an authentic delicacy -- the downside of which can be sentimentality or bathos.) The letters from 1965 to 1980 continue to discuss literary and other ideas with a variety of writers, unknown admirers and would-be poets.

But the freshest, most unexpected development is Wright’s discovery of travel writing. He and Anne were to make three extended trips to Europe between 1973 and 1979, during which Wright explored themes in his journal and, we find, in his letters. He brings to these sketches his well-known lyrical bent: “The churches of Verona, their elegant towers, rise into the green spring like anemones underwater.” Wright’s sense of humor often comes in as well, mixed with timely similes: “There is to me something sweltering about London, something pallid and extravagantly fleshy and sagging and perspiring, even in the bleakest dryness and cold, like the back of Richard M. Nixon’s neck by night in a desert, tossing his moon-shadows like spittle to the mutant crocodiles of the sand.”

Near the end of his and Anne’s last trip to Europe, Wright got a sore throat, the first symptom of a malignant tumor at the base of his tongue -- a darkly ironic illness for a poet. In the last letter in this volume, addressed to Galway Kinnell, Wright shares a thoughtful insight with characteristic flair, before he tells his friend about his illness: “[T]he truth is there is something terrible, almost unspeakably terrible, in our lives, and it demands respect, and, for some reason that seems to me quite insane, it doesn’t hate us. There, you see? Every time I try to write it down it comes out gibberish.”