SOURCE: “Ars Longa,” in Poetry, Vol. CLXXV, No. 1, October-November, 1999, pp. 78-89.

In the following essay, McClatchy provides an overview of Wright's artistic and thematic development from the publication of The Grave of the Right Hand through Appalachia. While offering a generally favorable assessment of Wright's poetry, McClatchy faults the retrospective arrangement of Wright's work into a unified series of trilogies.

Some long poems are born long; some achieve length; and some have length thrust upon them. In the beginning, there was an orderly sequence to a poet's career, from the lyric to the epic, and genres were steadied by tradition. In the nineteenth century, rigid categories and definitions loosened, and every stay or knot was next undone either by modernist poets or adventuresome readers. No one reads Whitman's Leaves of Grass as the long poem Whitman himself may have thought it, and some oddball critics have read a...