SOURCE: “Charles Wright, Poet of Landscape, Melds Tradition and Innovation,” in Chronicle of Higher Education, September 18, 1998, pp. B10-11.

In the following essay, Ingalls presents an overview of Wright's formative experiences, his poetry and artistic concerns, and critical reception.

In the beginning, Charles Wright didn't know he wanted to write poetry.

“It sort of came like a thunderbolt out of the blue,” he says.

The year was 1959, and he was 23, newly arrived in Verona: Italy, as a member of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. He had read some fiction and a little T. S. Eliot as an undergraduate at Davidson College, but no poetry to speak of—no poetry that spoke to him.

He had picked up a copy of Ezra Pound's Cantos in the airport in New York, and had taken it along with him on a sightseeing trip to Sirmione, a town on the tip...