James Arlington Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio. He grew up in this steel-mill town, living for a while on a small farm nearby; both places appear in his poetry. He served with the army in Japan in World War II and later went to Kenyon College from which he graduated in 1952, receiving the Robert Frost Poetry Prize. Wright spent 1953 at the University of Vienna on a Fulbright scholarship to study the work of Theodor Storm. Returning to the United States, he entered the University of Washington at Seattle, where he studied with Theodore Roethke, and received his M.A. in 1954 and his Ph.D. in 1959. During this period, he received Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards in 1954 and 1955, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Award from Poetry magazine in 1955, and in 1957 his first volume of poetry, The Green Wall , was selected for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets...