SOURCE: “The Continuity of James Wright's Poems,” in The Ohio Review, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 1977, pp. 44-57.

In the following essay, Matthews argues against the accepted critical judgement that Wright's early, metrically formal poetry is more skillful than his later free verse.

By now most everyone who cares about American poetry knows the story about James Wright's The Branch Will Not Break (1963). But like the tale of Abner Doubleday and the invention of baseball, the story is more shapely than true, and its use has been primarily for polemicists. So because I think James Wright has already written a significant body of generous and beautiful poems, and because I think the story distracts us from noticing some of the more important things Wright has actually been doing in developing that body of poetry, I begin my essay-in-tribute by debunking it.

For Robert Bly, writing in The Sixties in...