SOURCE: “From ‘Between New Voice and Old Master,”’ in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXVIII, No. 4, October-December, 1960, pp. 43-45.

In the following essay, Hoffman finds in Wright's attention to defeated people in his poetry the answer to the poet's questions: “What is good and humane action, and why perform it?”

The condemned, the lost, the disfigured, the loved, the guilty Americans in James Wright's poems move through his stanzas as presences who make the poet speak and in speaking define himself by his reactions to them. The questions which summoned them to him, he tells us, are moral ones: “I have tried to shape these poems … in order to ask … Exactly what is a good and humane action? And, even if one knows what such an action is, then exactly why should he perform it?” Recalling Mr. Wright's admiration for Robert Frost, one thinks of Frost's apothegm about where...