SOURCE: “Wright's Lyricism,” in The Southern Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, April, 1991, pp. 438-64.

In the following essay, Scott explores Wright's lyricism, especially in the late prose poems.

Above the River, which collects all of James Wright's poetry, coming as it does more than a decade after his death, reminds us of the stubborn persistency with which much of the poetry lasts. It is more frequently than not the case that the literary art that becomes immovably a part of the furniture of one's mind and spirit wins its place of settlement by reason of a pleasure it affords through the brilliant suasiveness with which it conducts a certain kind of argument. But this is a particular pleasure—offered, say, amongst the people of his generation by a Richard Wilbur or an Anthony Hecht—that is rarely to be come by in Wright's poetry, so greatly did he yield to...