SOURCE: “Many of Our Waters: The Poetry of James Wright,” in Boundary 2, Vol. IX, No. 2, Winter, 1981, pp. 101-21.

In the following essay, Kalaidjian discusses the importance of water and river imagery in Wright's poetry.

At first glance, the movement of James Wright's career away from the initial apprenticeship to traditional verse forms to his later postmodernist innovations, under the influence of Robert Bly's “deep image” poetry and Spanish surrealism, appears erratic and disjunctive, lacking in a common center of inspiration and unifying technique. His final quest from Shall We Gather at the River to To a Blossoming Pear Tree for a more personal style—a more authentic subjectivity cleared of the flamboyant eclecticism of image in his earlier volumes—on the surface also looks less creative and more destructive than I would like to argue it truly proves to be. To arrive at the underlying coherence and continuity...