SOURCE: “‘I Would Break into Blossom’: Neediness and Transformation in the Poetry of James Wright,” in Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring, 1983, pp. 64-75.

In the following essay, an obituary tribute to Wright, Martone examines the theme of transformation in his poetry.

I. Garments of Adieu.

It is difficult to speak retrospectively of James Wright's poetry, to think of it as a completed ouevre rather than as an ongoing body of work, for Wright's was very much a poetic of transformation. As Dave Smith puts it, “Wright insists that the most fundamental nature of poetry is in its affirmation of possibility.”¹ For Wright, transformation is implicit in the very notion of metaphor, in the figuring of one thing as another. The figurative process in poetry is kin to the processes of metamorphosis in nature. For Wright there is a vital bond between poetry and life...