SOURCE: “Old Masters,” in Southern Review, Vol. 35, No. 3, Summer, 1999, pp. 621-34.

In the following excerpt, Daniels concludes that the poems of Appalachia reveal an “emptiness” indicative of Wright's unresolved spiritual longing.

Could two poets be more different than Adrienne Rich and Charles Wright? Rich conceives of her job as fierce seeing—“the thing itself and not the myth,” she wrote, famously, in “Diving into the Wreck”—but Wright attempts the opposite:

Nothing's more abstract, more unreal,                                         than what we actually see. The job is to make it otherwise. 

(“Basic Dialogue”)

Wright couldn't be more bored by unmediated visions of the things we “actually see.” He is after not merely “the names of things,” but “their real names, / Not what we call them, but what / They call themselves when no one's listening” (“The Writing Life”). In Appalachia, the ninth book in his ambitious trilogy-of-trilogies project, Wright is more consumed...