SOURCE: “Dark Water: James Wright's Early Poetry,” in The Centennial Review, Vol. XXVII, No. 2, Spring, 1983, pp. 135-55.

In the following essay, Mazzaro traces the aesthetic and ethical development of Wright's poetry.

When James Wright came on the literary scene in the mid-fifties, he possessed what few other young poets had—command. This command could be felt in the ranges of his diction, line, and stanza as well as in the varied ways he handled subjects. His writing could move from the soft romanticism of “fumbled for the sunlight with her eyes” to the neoclassicism of “I mourn no soul but his.” It could also embrace a Shakespearean “fruits of summer in the fields of love.” Being a singer of human reality, Wright's inheritance and business was song. He knew that sung and unsung nature differed greatly and that what the poet chose to sing was often seen through...