Review: James Wright, The Good Poet

Author(s): William Harmon

Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 90, No. 4 (Fall, 1982), pp. 612-623
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27544066
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612 ARTS AND LETTERS

to Dante, The Romance of the Rose, and even The Dream of the Rood,
and that therefore the development of this kind of poetry has little to
do with that happened in the cultural history of England in
anything
the fourteenth century.
The judge in the Hinckley case did not
grant his jurors access to a
so that could resolve their uncertainties about the es
dictionary they
sential nature of poetry. He knew that even if a
probably dictionary
should give them accurate information the answers they would get
from it would be wrong, for one cannot understand what is interesting
about poetry through simple dichotomies like fiction and fact?or enter
tainment and instruction, oral and literate. Although dictionaries and
cultural history can facilitate themselves can
understanding, by they
easy answers, not true answers.
give only

JAMESWRIGHT, THE GOOD POET

WILLIAM HARMON

James Wright (1927-1980) was an

Although extraordinarily sophisti
cated and erudite poet, he kept plenty of room in his heart for the
humble virtues. A concordance will show that he was never too lofty
to make frequent use of and bad?words that have become mem
good
bers of an endangered verbal species. Bad has come to mean
good,
while good has slipped down to the C-minus range, above fair but be
low excellent and other hyperbolic superlatives.
Against the odds, then, and against the prevailing customs of his en
vironment, Wright could call a poem "The Young Good Man" and end
it "I don't mean some
to die/For good time yet." In "Paul" he could
me up out of the street/Is
say that anybody who "could pick good to
me," and add that "I would like to be you, too, good man."
good/To
That may be a simpleminded pun on Paul Goodman's name, but the
obvious play on simple words is itself a humble, modest, endearing
device. "Prayer to the Good Poet," Wright's poem to Horace, begins,
"Quintus Horatius Flaccus, my good secret,/Now my father, a good
man in Ohio,/Lies alone in pain." (All these examples come from Two
Dave Smith, editor, The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright.
University of Illinois Press, 1982. xxviii -f 260 pages. $18.95; James Wright, This
Journey. Random House, 1982. 94 pages. $10.50, $5.95 pb.

? 1982. U. of the South: Sewanee Review. 0037-3052/82/1015-0612/$01.09/0.

 ARTS AND LETTERS 613

1973.) So when I say that James Wright was a

Citizens, good poet, I
am his characteristic and two
using vocabulary saying things about
was a man and he wrote well.
goodness: Wright good
Those nine monosyllables are so easy for me to put down that there
is some of our
danger forgetting how hard it is to be good and to work
well. Wright's books seem to bear the scars, stretch-marks, and tro
phies of much and even some defeat. He had a certain kind
struggle
of good poem in mind, but he never achieved it, not quite. It was a
vexing, perplexing problem of making ends meet. Here I am tempted
to revise Blake and claim that, yes, extremes do indeed meet, but not
until you introduce them. For the extremes were ends, in many
Wright
senses, of subject and technique. Wright's Democratic Vistas embraced
so much that they make Whitman's look Republican. wanted
Wright
to canonize Judas and all the nameless sinners and pariahs. His outcast
and downtrodden
people were not the picturesque peasantry of the
Liberal Imagination, not the Joads of Steinbeck, not the en
eloquent
tertaining Snopeses of Faulkner. Wright's were scum, the
"people"
dregs, the horrible and disgusting filth of gutter, slum, and a richly
deserved death row. Wright seems not
only
to have smooched
lepers
but also to have rejoiced in their same time he
leprosy. At the rejoiced
in the beautiful things of nature and culture: love among people, great
art, the masterpieces and royalty of the plant and animal
kingdoms.
The glory of Wright's To a Blossoming Pear Tree is only a func
partly
tion of the pear's unilateral the also on the
beauty; glory depends
horrible presence of a shameless queer old derelict. Both tree and man
?terminal extremes of health and disease?do what they do in passion
ate response to a summons to love in one way or another.
biological
Courageously Wright launched poem after poem in the direction of
this indulgent democratic ideal, and it can be a thrilling enterprise to
witness.
We can figure out that Wright was fond of women, horses, and flow
ers, but that affection is insufficient justification for poems. Wright took
pains, most of the time, to include the countervailing disaffection, so
that the sentiment in his best poems remains
poised between attrac
tion and repulsion. The reader looks up from "Two Poems about Presi
dent Harding" in the nicest state of it has to take
equilibrium. Maybe
two poems to create such we do not know whether to rest
uncertainty;
in the assurance that "Harding was a fool" or to share in the
recogni
tion (at least between Ohioans) that "he was beautiful." To include
and
Judas, Harding, Daley, murderers, drooling winos in lyric poems
requires much more talent than Whitman's of sanctimonious
practice
slumming. The struggle to memorialize the aristocrats of squalor, the
world-class crooks alongside the no-class losers, drew Wright to a cor
respondingly forked aesthetic. He seemed to want to embrace both
614 ARTS AND LETTERS

in one hug: to keep

James Whitcomb Riley and Rainer Maria Rilke
faith with the corniest midwestern vernacular (a faith rather like Or
son Welles's for Booth or Eliot's for Mark Twain)
respect Tarkington,
and at the same time to respond to the voices of conti
hypermodern
nental symbolist and surrealist poets whose primordial archetypal lan
guages may lie even in the soul than one's native (Some
deeper vulgate.
moments in Mallarm? and Rilke have a rubbed-smooth quality, either
so spontaneous or so elaborated that the senses of recognition, ano
and incantation are close to raw folklore.) Wright's effort to
nymity,
celebrate while recognizing the squalor inside and
splendor honestly
outside oneself, along with the parallel effort to honor conventional
verse-verities, as in Robinson and Frost, while comprehend
registered
ing Rilke and Neruda?these labors resulted in nine volumes of poetry
over a the Collected
published twenty-five-year period (including
Poems and the posthumous This Journey). The nine make up a corpus
that is the most inconsistent known to me and is also among the most
distinguished. The transition from The Branch Will Not Break (1963)
to Shall We Gather at the River (1968) seems relatively smooth, but
the other items in the series represent swerves, leaps, experiments, feints,
backslidings, divagations, miscues, and even episodes of repudiation.
more or less washed his hands of both The Green Wall and
(Wright
Two Citizens. He need not and should not have done so, but his ges
tures of retraction and in the honorable
apology place him company
of Pound, Auden, and Lowell: poets who the public to
permitted
watch them hammer out their canons draft by draft with little sense
of the finished product that scares artists as much as it comforts an
audience.)
This Journey, which cannot be called a culmination, is simply the
last book by a poet who died too soon. It contains some very fine poems
and some that seem inchoate or perfunctory. (But Wright at his most
could be far superior to many another poet at his most
perfunctory
brilliant.) "Wherever Home Is" impresses me as a poem in Wright's
most convincing voice:

Good riddance a little while to the insane.

Although the wisteria gets nowhere
And the sea wind crumbles Leonardo down,
A new lizard frolics in the cold sunlight
Between Leonardo's thumb and his palette.
One brief lizard
Lavishes on Leonardo and on me
The whole spring.

In a few poems like "Lament: Fishing with Richard Hugo" Wright

treats his own sharp tongue to a banquet of mockery:
 ARTS AND LETTERS 615
If John Updike had been
Ed Bedford, his wife
Zetta would have called
Goose Prairie something high-toned.
Swan Meadow? The Ironic
Byronic Paradox in two
Eleatic heuristic footnotes?

(Of course this is unfair to Updike. When was satire ever fair?) One
these voices almost as much as one admires
enjoys complex Wright's
mastery of plain English?a flat trajectory with a hint, at the end,
just
of Rilkean curvature:

saw
Light feet I walking
Bewildered by long stems,
She walked away.
And still I sit here talking.
And I still have, it seems,
The east wind to say.
?"This and That"

One can speculate that Wright could have put all his voices and talents
in a book-length poem or sustained sequence. He could not handle
plots, and most of his characters reduce to one persona called "James
Arlington Wright"; but that persona has enough depth and richness,
and his experience takes in enough time (from classical antiquity to this
century's Hardings, Eisenhowers, and Mayor Daleys; from Sappho to
Doris Day and Barbra Streisand) and covers enough ground (China,
Ohio, Italy) to have generated a great we
Hawaii, long poem. Instead
must be content with the pieces that we have. A Collected
Complete
Wright may disclose the lineaments of a unified Poem after all.
Of the seventy poems in This Journey, almost a third are in prose.
Most of these are all right, I suppose, and a few (preeminently "Honey")
are as as of this sort that I know of. But "this sort" in
good anything
itself somehow fails to satisfy. Mixed in with as in This
ordinary verse,
Journey, the prose poems have a chance of pleasing; but, in a work
like Wright's Moments of the Italian Summer (1976), in which all the
so-called poems are prose, the total effect is and
unsettling frustrating.
Unable to account for my own
strong dislike for such halfway forms, I
find myself that Babbitt could come back from the dead
wishing Irving
in order to update that robust in the arts, The New
study of confusion
Laoko?n For that matter can still
(1910). Lessing's original Laoko?n
deliver an analeptic dose of intelligence. One can imagine the deftness
and acidity with which Babbitt could liquidate such dogmas as that
stated in Harold Bloom's A Map of Misreading (1975) : "As literary his
616 ARTS AND LETTERS

as all
tory lengthens, all poetry necessarily becomes verse-criticism, just
criticism becomes prose-poetry." If Babbitt and Lessing for some rea
son are not available to take the stand, we can do almost as well with
some testimony from a most recent book, Mark Harris's
interesting
Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck (1980). "This is a book of nonfic
tion," Harris writes, "a pure category opposed to pure fiction. No such
exists under the name nonfiction novel. No thing exists by the
thing
name
prose-poetry."
Leaving the question of the nonfiction novel in a grey crepuscular
limbo with the TV-movie, songs without words, and that ulcerating
obscenity "and/or," I will say only that the prose poem is just a piece
of prose?either fiction or nonfiction?that is no poem at all and has no
claim to the status of poetry because it lacks one element essential to
make a poem a poem: the line. The line of the poem need not be regu
lar or metrical or
rhythmic
or
metaphorical; it need not begin with a
letter or feature or alliteration or diction. The
capital rhyme poetical
line does not have to be anything in but it does have to be.
particular,
It seems that, in graphic, visual terms, a proper poem must not have a
notorious observation on this
justified right margin. (Jeremy Bentham's
not be so after all.) Poetry may be
subject may simpleminded prosaic,
but it may not be prose. John Ashbery's Three Poems a mis
just has
leading misnomer for a title. Val?ry's pieces called "poems in the rough"
a certain contour of the "creative that grinds and
suggest process"
prose into poetry, but the pieces are not poems. Some poets
polishes
have a more definite feel for the printed word, a better sense
clearly
of the line, than others. Having read Wright's poems and heard him
read aloud, I judge that he enjoyed an uncommonly lucid and potent
sense of the line: pulse, pause, continuity, interruption, enjambment,
silent space and speaking space. Here, perfectly managed and exe
cuted, is the first strophe of "Contemplating the Front Steps of the
Cathedral in Florence as the Dies":
Century

Once, in some hill trees long ago,

A red-tailed hawk paused
to look me over
Long enough
Halfway down the air.
He held still, and plainly
Said, go.
It was no time
For singing about the beauties of nature,
And I went fast.
I stubbed my toe
On a rock hidden by the big wing-shadows,
But the small wound
Was worth paying for.
 ARTS AND LETTERS 617
I got one glimpse of him,
Alive, before I die.
And that is all I know
About his body.

Then, after a gruesome description of a dead bird crawling with beetles

and maggots, the resilient poem ends with a virtuoso demonstration
of mastery of long line and short:

Let out in the terrible

them have Giotto's long wing stretched sunlight.
they will rend one another
Maybe
And explode.

(Wright's collocation of a dying century and an emblematic bird re

sembles the floor plan of Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush.") These lines
increase in resolution with each reading. The voice dwells first on the
repetitions at the ends of lines?"ago," "go," "toe," "know"
foregrounded
?and then these repetitions pick up echoes inside the lines?particular
in the first
ly "no." One hears the "long" that is repeated unobtrusively
sentence, the modulated resonances between "Once" and "one," "small"
and "all," "for" and "before." The rhyming spondee "I die" is climac
tically powerful. (And it prompts me to suggest that, if this poem is
it is also his One savors
Wright's "Darkling Thrush," "Windhover.")
the pause after "paused" and wonders why on earth a poet who can do
such things should ever forswear the art of the line. Comic?or prosaic
relief? No volume needs "relief" to the point of being boring. Wright
commanded a range of
poetic devices adequate to provide all the re
lief and variety that a book may need. Without the prose poems, This
a
Journey stands as the work of good
man who wrote well.

The Pure Clear Word, edited by Dave Smith, is a letdown. Maybe I

was too much. beguiled the atavis
unrealistically expecting Maybe, by
tic-nominal knowledge that a Goodman was a good man, I was too ex
cited by the spectacle of a smith at work on the work of a wright.
Maybe I expected too much of a volume of essays written mostly by
critics who are also poets themselves. (The old "guild mentality" just
will not hold up.) Maybe I got what any starry-eyed reader deserves.
there are some fine and useful moments and a wonderful
Although
sustained interview, the book as a whole is a disappointment. The
$18.95 that it costs could be better spent on three or four volumes of
new poetry.
In addition to the interview with Wright The Pure Clear Word con
tains a reprinting of a foreword (Auden's, The Green Wall) of some
historical interest and some historic fatuousness, together with twelve
essays. There is no index and no attempt at cross-reference. Two of the
618 ARTS AND LETTERS

essayists refer appreciatively to an essay by James Seay in a 1973

but in neither
Georgia Review, place is there any indication that the
can be found here in this volume. You do not have to be
piece right
Albert Einstein or Sherlock Holmes to figure out, sooner or later, that
Seay's piece is here, but even Einstein and Holmes needed all the help
they could get. Robert Bly's amusingly prickly essay ends with a newly
attached paragraph of much less prickly clarification, and
apology,
disavowal; but the other essays stand as they were first published.
The editor, noting that the essays were all written while was
Wright
alive, says: "Many of the writers have expressed concern about the
or
tense, phrasing, style of their essays in light of that fact. It has
seemed proper to print the essays as were written and published.
they
are, after all, to the life in
They responses James Wright's poems." I,
for one, wish the "many" had been given a chance to revise as they saw
fit, so that the volume would exhibit an impression less of haste, oppor
tunistic expediency, and xerography, and more of responsibility, ma
turity, and There is in some
perspective. nothing proper maintaining
a non
irrelevantly "original" form, and it is sequitur to justify this edi
torial policy?or lack calling the essays something that
thereof?by
many of them are to the life" in the poems.
patently not?"responses
Yet another drawback of the apparatus of the book is that some of the
information in the was out of date even before the book
bibliography
was This 12 April 1982, two months be
published. fourney (published
fore The Pure Clear Word) does not appear on the list of "Works by
James Wright," and many poems in that book are listed here under
"Uncollected Poetry." This sort of confusion can be out
straightened
in later printings or editions, but one must suppose that a bit of ele
mentary coordination among editors, publishers, and bibliographers
could have gone a long way toward avoiding such confusion.
One does not with impunity accuse W. H. Auden of fatuousness. He
could be the least fatuous of writers in both poetry and criticism. But
he was called on to write a prodigious amount of casual prose, and he
responded to such calls of duty dutifully. He could be almost breath
even in a blurb or book-club more often he
takingly brilliant, puff; but
could get tedious. He was at his best when he had to write about estab
lished masterpieces that were not in British English and not in verse
(I am thinking especially of what he had to say about the prose of Poe
and Melville). He was at his worst when he had to speculate about
abnormal psychology. When he had to write about poets younger than
himself, he settled for a bland of lukewarmth.
middle-ground dogmatic
or his foreword to The Green Wall be
"Consciously unconsciously,"
draws a frontier between the and the non
gins, "every poet poetical
poetical; certain objects, persons, events seem to him capable of em
bodiment in a poem, even if he has not yet discovered how, while there
are others which it would never occur to him to consider himself,
 ARTS AND LETTERS 619
whatever other poets may have done with them." Auden drones on for
some hundreds of words, hardly a dozen of which add a bit to one's
admiration for Auden or appreciation of Wright. This space could have
been put to more interesting use if it had been devoted to something
Robert or Alan Williamson, two younger who
by Pinsky poet-critics
have written intelligently about Wright. Or, for a refreshing change of
pace, something like the penultimate poem in James Dickey's Puella.
This poem, "The Surround," has a subtitle that presents Deborah, who
is Dickey's wife and puella-persona,: Herself as the En
"Imagining
vironment, She Speaks to James Wright at Sundown."
The twelve essays in The Pure Clear Word include reviews, articles,
and some less formal Three are re
review-articles, pieces. good; the
maining nine as well be peas in one The
might undistinguished pod.
brightest among the three good essays is Robert Bly's, which possesses
at least the virtue of a colorful a banal Nemerov
trashing of poem:
"The rhyme does its part, up, like square wheels on
shaking everything
a cart; the poem becomes fused into a mass, like an old
finally single
jelly sandwich." Edward Butscher in "The Rise and Fall of James
Wright" considers the evidence and hands down his
dispassionately
verdicts and sentences or
lucidly. A reader may demur disagree, but
I think one has to admire Butscher's courage. Robert Hass's lively per
sonal essay fully earns its last word about he is beauti
Wright?"And
ful"?by scrupulously subjecting
much of Wright's poetry to a demand
ing skeptical analysis. Butscher and Hass together make up a good
consideration of the besetting flaw that haunts poetry such as
Wright's
?sentimentality.
Henry Taylor's "In the Mode of Robinson and Frost: James Wright's
Early Poetry" is redeemed from bathos by one useful piece of scholarly
research, which suggests a highly plausible meaning for the odd word
orplidean that appears in two of poems. As for the connection
Wright's
between Robinson and Wright, I have to say?in spite of re
Wright's
peated tributes and expressions of indebtedness?that the most con
spicuous quality the two poets have in common is their middle name.
In "James Wright: The Quest Motif in The Branch Will Not Break"
Peter Stitt tries to sort out whether says "I am
Wright's speaker who
a full-blooded Sioux Indian" is or is not a full-blooded Sioux Indian.
William Matthews is one of my favorite poets, but I am
sorry that he
wrote "The of
Continuity James Wright's Poems." The essay opens in
the key of Crackerbarrel Subliterate now most everyone who cares
("By
about American . . ."), then modulates into Lyric Profound with
poetry
a of "Gerontion" is
replay ("The earth lovely and it lives by death.
What can we do with such then veers again in the direc
knowledge?"),
tion of grammatical fogginess (Wright's style "reminds me as much of
Sherwood Anderson's prose as it does of any poet"). Warmed up, the
piece achieves earnest unctuousness : "A translator can over into
bring
620 ARTS AND LETTERS

his own language the denotative level of a poem and its physical im
But tonal and textural in the poem are in the lan
agery. peculiarities
it was written.
guage?we might almost say of the language?in which
can't be detached from it." Then Matthews makes an assertion
They
that is either erroneous or "In we indicate
incomprehensible: English
whether a construction is subjective or by word
genitive objective
order; in Romance this is done by inflection." Whatever
languages
is
Matthews's point may be, it is tiresome and irrelevant. James Seay
another of my favorite poets, but his "A World Immeasurably Alive
and Good: A Look at James Wright's Collected Poems79 suffers from
such poverty of vocabulary that its force and clarity are weakened. In
a few sentences he must say focus, thematic context, attitude, tone,
aspects, and other zilch-words; and then he talks about "Wright's senti
ments in the entire thematic context of loneliness and its related
themes." This is prose that gropes. It seems to lack faith in itself and is
unwilling to say "theme" or
"technique" when "thematic context" or
"technical aspect" is available through the Buddy System of pleonasm.
attention to the persistent and pervasive im
Seay does pay passing
portance of women and horses inWright's poetry. The elegance and
Secrets" can convince and enter
learning of Stephen Yenser's "Open
tain a reader. Yenser drops all the big names: Thoreau, Apollinaire,
Rilke (the title of whose "Archaischer Torso Apollos" is misspelled),
Eliot, Ortega y Gasset; but this heavy referential metal is largely wasted
on jackhammering one very simple point?that Wright sought bare
ness, nakedness, in A mountain of discursive argu
transparency poetry.
ment labors and brings forth a mouse of superficial observation.
Leonard Nathan's "The Tradition of Sadness and the American
An of the of James Wright" is an
Metaphysic: Interpretation Poetry
other laboring mountain, but this one brings forth not even a mouse.
This case of false pregnancy reads like a sympathetically written but
and shallow of a low-level survey course. "The melan
glib summary
as such, first appears in English poetry in Milton's II
choly character,
Penseroso," says Nathan, unaware of the much older psy
apparently
tradition of "humors." Nathan continues: "It was the
chophysiological
romantics who first, at least in theory, aimed to merge man and poet,
and make
poet and speaker, and speaker and speaker's deepest feelings
those feelings the subject of many of their poems"?as though Shake
and Donne never wrote their sonnets, as never
speare though Pope
his great epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Along the way?making
composed
me think that he missed class for a couple of weeks and had to borrow
some moron's notes?Nathan secretes a echoic sentence that,
weirdly
to my ear, reverberates with its own essential emptiness: "That these
were often sad is no if one understands the
feelings deeply surprise
dialectic of romantic poetic. . . ." Ic ic ic: Like other essayists in
yuckl
The Pure Clear Word Nathan misconstrues the pattern of
radically
 ARTS AND LETTERS 621
career and the recent verse. Nathan sum
Wright's history of English
marizes the survey of the Tradition of Sadness and comes by and by
to our in some revolution of sensi
century and the "next logical step"
"If the man with the and the poet was
bility: merged poet speaking
with the utmost sincerity, then formal patterns like rhyme, traditional
meter, symmetrical line and stanza, surely had to go, and go they did
for many a poet. First we got vers libre and in our own time, the 'open
or naked' poem which attempts to represent, both in its diction and
cadences, actual The comma after "time" is wrong, the place
speech."
ment of "both" is wrong, and the whole idea is wrong. Nathan is a
and I am at his to such a tissue of
good poet, dismayed ability produce
error. Nothing he says about vers libre is quite true, and very little of
what he says in general applies toWright in particular. (This Journey,
I ought to point out, contains a 1979 Inscription on Belli's
"Reading
Monument," which is a fine mean poem and also a perfectly regular
Anglo-Italian sonnet.) Vers libre, as Eliot pointed out about sixty-five
years ago, is an oxymoron and a misnomer. No vers is libre; in fact,
in a language is libre. Even if all you want to do is goof off or
nothing
be iconoclastic, when you commit yourself to language you commit
to of relations that are so that it
yourself complex systems confining
matters what you may decide about such incidental properties
hardly
of language as rhythm and rhyme. Once you have made the commit
ment to language?even in the absence of any commitment to com
or sense or may as well
municating making expressing anything?you
take advantage of such rhetorical and prosodie help as your language
can be coaxed into If you have any aptitude for writing,
furnishing.
the of measured verse?grace so much under pres
probably discipline
sure that with the there is no be much more liber
pressure grace?will
as "free"
ating and much more genuinely expressive than art posing
when in fact it is suffering and enjoying conditions of determined im
The prison of nakedness is much more than the
prisonment. confining
prison of wearing clothes.
In his introduction to The Pure Clear Word and in "That Halting,
Stammering Movement" Dave Smith repeatedly essays arguments that
are undermined his unfortunate prose. This prose is
repeatedly by
a chronic . . . had" clauses: "As Dickens
plagued by problem with "as
had, Wright's language croons, curses, stings, whines, giggles, fawns,
shouts, demands, coos, and drones as is strategic." Later Smith says of
a certain sort of
poetry: "It might, as it had for the Chinese, be a kind
of powerful and direct statement, such a statement would
though
have to recognize the simultaneous beauty and horror which truth is."
One of Smith's bad sentences, which says the opposite of
manifestly
what it is evidently trying, latently, to mean, made me exclaim in an
to the language itself "O
apostrophe perfidious Albionese!" "Only when
as vital as life itself," Smith writes,
language has turned "could James
622 ARTS AND LETTERS

or more than impotent against the

Wright's, anyone's, poem be waiting
slag heaps." I will grant, after all my griping, that none of the pieces in
The Pure Clear Word partakes of the Deconstruction Derby that has
become, for too many people, the most popular substitute for intelli
gent criticism. But I cannot find much else to say in favor of the
volume.
Smith's interview with Wright is
something else again. Wright's part
of it is not only wonderful; it is wonderful against the odds. Any inter
view that manages not to be random chat is bound to be a stacked
deck. From the deck at hand Wright was dealt any number of poten
cards: "Did . . .
tially perplexing you play high school football? Why
do you so insistently use certain words such as alone, lonely, dark and
so on in your ... Do
poems? you think of a poem or a book as having a
statemental or communicative function?" I would be tempted to show
the dealer of such shameful questions the door. At the most charitable
I would tell the dealer to shut up about Robinson and Frost and to
mention, at least, George Orwell or Nelson or F. Scott Fitz
Algren
or however?bless his heart?conducted him
gerald Thackeray. Wright,
self with marvelous patience, politeness, graciousness, and good cheer,
so that I
regret my own contempt for the questions.
Wright's tact and friendliness converted the interview into an easy
forum in which he certain causes and honored a
going espoused large
number of well-varied ancestors and colleagues. He comes across as a
warmly enthusiastic reader whose breadth of erudition is not addressed
answerably by any of the essays in The Pure Clear Word. (I have in
mind here a recent experience that confirms my belief that one port of
call on the Critics' Cruise is Serendip. Within two or three days of
came
reading the last line of This Journey?'On top of the sunlight"?I
across a similar of the sunshine"?in an
remarkably phrase?"on top
other midwesterner's description of Americans' experience in Eu
rope: book 2, 8 of Tender Is the a point
chapter Night.) Wright repeats
he often made, about the advantages of being born in Martins Ferry,
Ohio. (Was it really the birthplace also of W. D. Howells?) Wright
enjoyed being from a sort of national crossroads, neither southern nor
northern, eastern nor western. Late in life, with a kind of sabbatical
a environment and wrote
ecstasy, he found Hawaii similarly mixed
some that are set there. But he did not talk much about
good poems
himself. Instead he displayed more wit and wisdom than I have seen
on a in a time.
printed page long
was espe
As editor of The Oxford Book of American Light Verse I
to the anthology twice in the in
cially gratified by Wright's referring
terview (even though the title is slightly wrong in one place). Recalling
his days at Kenyon, he quotes a parody of Ransom, "Balls on Joan
Whiteside's Stogie":
 ARTS AND LETTERS 623
There was such smoke in our little buggy
and such a tightness in our car stall
is it any wonder her brown stogie
us all?
asphyxiates

Wright also quotes a parody of his own most celebrated poem, "Lying
in a Hammock at William
Duffy's Farm
in Pine Island, Minnesota."
Wright's poem ends "I have wasted my life"; the parody, sent toWright
a Ron Smith of Richmond, ends in a prismatic line that
by Virginia,
shows classical economy of means: "I have wasted my wife." I do not
care for The Pure Clear Word as a whole, but the interview,
bespeak
a man with a
ing the presence of good capacious mind, a big heart, and
a
great sense of humor, makes the book worth having.

THE CELTIC CENTER

JAY PARINI

Although the English may still believe that the center of poetry in
their language lies in England, the evidence has been accumulating
that the real vitality has shifted to the Celtic Fringe?Ireland, Scot
land, and Wales. Scotland can boast of Brown, Nor
George Mackay
man MacCaig, and Iain Crichton Smith; Wales has its severe lyrical
clergyman R. S. Thomas; Ireland possesses an embarrassment of riches
Eavan Boland, Introducing Eavan Roland: Poems. Ontario Review Press, 1981.
72 pages. $10.95, $5.95 Anthony
pb; Bradley, editor, Contemporary Irish Poetry:
An Anthology. University of California Press, 1980. 430 pages. $17.95; Ciar?n
Carson, The New Estate. Wake Forest University Press, 1976. Illustrated. 42 pages.
$3.25 pb; Austin Clarke, Selected Poems, edited by Thomas Kinsella. Wake Forest
University Press, 1976, 1980. 208 pages. $12.95, $6.95 pb; Seamus Heaney, Field
Work. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979. 66 pages. $8.95, $4.95 pb; Thomas Kinsella,
Peppercanister Poems: 1972-1978. Wake Forest University Press, 1979. 160 pages.
$9.95, $5.95 pb; Thomas Kinsella, Poems: 1956-1973. Wake Forest University
Press, 1979. 192 pages. $10.95, $6.25 pb; Derek Mahon, Poems: 1962-1978. Ox
ford University Press, 1979. 118 pages. $8.95 pb; John Montague, The Rough
Field. Wake Forest University Press, 1979, third edition. 84 pages. $4.95 pb; Paul
Muldoon, Mules. Wake Forest University Press, 1977. 60pages. $4.25 pb; Paul
Muldoon, Why Brownlee Left. Wake Forest University Press, 1980. 48 pages. $4.95
pb; Eil?an Ni Chuillean?in, The Second Voyage. Wake Forest University Press,
1977. 54 pages. $4.25 pb.

? 1982. U. of the South: Sewanee Review. 0037-3052/82/1015-0623/$01.02/0.