SOURCE: “James Wright and the Dissolving Self,” in Salmagundi, Nos. 22-23, Spring-Summer, 1973, pp. 222-33.

In the following essay, Molesworth reflects on the poetic implications of Wright's movement from his early distanced, classic style to his later romantic, more personal one.

Susan Sontag said that the two chief elements of the modern sensibility are “homosexual aesthetic irony and Jewish moral earnestness.” Perhaps the first qualifier in each triplet is excessive, but certainly most modern artists have traces of both qualities in some combination. In looking at his career, we can see that James Wright has moved from irony to earnestness. Because in his poetry the artist is still the suffering hero, because the outsider is still the seer, and most of all because the self is problematic even beyond the snares of the world, James Wright is modern. Because of the peculiar way these themes and subjects are articulated...