SOURCE: “The Vision of a Practical Man,” in Parnassus, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1991, pp. 216-41.

In the following essay, a review of Wright's Complete Poems, Jones traces Wright's development as a poet, the shifting influences on his style, and the strengths and weaknesses of his poetry.

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James Wright wrote with more heart than any other North American poet of the twentieth century. His flaws were so obvious that it is hardly useful to point them out. He was capable of a sentimentality so overblown that it can only be described as heroic, and a preciousness of diction that rivals Shelley's, but in poem after poem, he dug down into the emotional extremes of the inner life, opened the veins, gathered strength from his own misery and wonder, and lifted out poems whose intense gravity did not worry their supple and often playful surfaces. His essential gifts were a remarkable literary...