Admired for depicting the little dramas lived by the lonely and alienated, poet James Arlington Wright probed the distances between people. A lyric romanticist in the tradition of Robert Frost and E. A. Robinson, Wright profited from classes with teachers John Crowe Ransom and Theodore Roethke. His literary output was phenomenal: seven poetry collections and seven volumes of translated verse, plus a prose anthology and seven posthumous volumes. The conversational ease of his voicing, fidelity to detail, and immediacy of subjects are evident in such titles as “A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard’s Shack,” “Confession to J. Edgar Hoover,” and “At the Executed Murderer’s Grave.”
Wright was born into a family of Irish talkers and storytellers on December 13, 1927, in Martins Ferry, Ohio. His Midwestern working-class roots held firm through three decades of poetic portraits drawn from heartland realities. During the Depression, his father suffered layoffs from the Hazel-Atlas glass factory. Wright thrived on public speaking in grade school and began writing verse in high school. After being drafted into the United States Army during World War II, he wrote his mother to forward copies of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ verse and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. After he was mustered out while serving in occupied Japan, he took advantage of the G. I. Bill and entered the only school that showed interest, Kenyon College.
After Wright shifted his concentration from vocational education to English and Russian literature, by 1952 he had published in twenty journals and earned the Robert Frost Poetry Prize, election to Phi Beta Kappa, and a B.A. degree. He attended the University of Vienna on a Fulbright Fellowship. At the University of Washington, he studied under poet Theodore Roethke and completed a dissertation on Dickensian comedy, then earned a Ph.D. in 1959. Simultaneously, he held a post as English instructor at the University of Minnesota while completing The Green Wall (1957), winner of a Yale Series of Younger Poets award. Three years later, he won the Ohiona Book Award for Saint Judas (1960).
Wright published The Lion’s Tail and Eyes: Poems Written Out of Laziness and Silence (1962) with William Duffy and Robert Bly. Wright’s break with traditionalism was influenced by his intimate study of German and Spanish masters, as demonstrated in The Branch Will Not Break (1963) and Shall We Gather at the River (1968). Throughout this period, he published regularly in some fifteen journals.
Wright held subsequent teaching positions at Macalester College, Hunter College, and State University of New York. His Collected Poems (1971) won a Pulitzer Prize. He was active for the remainder of the 1970s, when his elegies were issued in Two Citizens (1973), I See the Wind (1974), Old Booksellers and Other Poems (1976), Moments of the Italian Summer (1976), and To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1978). Much of the self-pity and despair of his early works disappeared after Wright conquered alcoholism and married his traveling companion Edith Anne Runk, whom he incorporated in a series of “Annie” poems. At his death from throat cancer on March 27, 1980, friends and colleagues eulogized him at Riverside Church in New York City. Posthumous works include This Journey (1982), The Temple in Nimes (1982), and Above the River: The Complete Poems (1992).
