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.

Bibliography

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Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. 1982).

Bly ,Robert, The Work of James Wright. James Wright: The Heart of Light. By

Stitt and Graziano, eds ( Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press ,2991.)

Dougherty, David James Wright ( Boston: Twayne, 1987.)

Dougherty, David, The Poetry of James Wright ( Tuscaloosa: University of

Alabama Press, 1991).

Elkins ,Andrew ,The Poetry of James Wright ( Tuscaloosa: The University of

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Hanna, William Scott, In Search of the Self, In Search of the Land: Toward a

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2012).

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