SOURCE: “A Listening to Walt Whitman and James Wright,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Vol. 9, No. 4, Spring, 1992, pp. 175-95.

In the following essay, Yatchisin shows how Wright's study of Walt Whitman's poetry contributed to the development of his own.

James Wright's essay, “The Delicacy of Walt Whitman,” published in 1962, might have saved Wright's poetic career. The four years between his books Saint Judas (1959) and The Branch Will Not Break (1963) were clearly tumultuous ones; Wright has said in a 1972 interview that “a certain kind of poetry had come to an end, and I thought that I would stop writing completely.”¹ Nowhere does he record an “A-ha!” experience while reading Leaves of Grass. But the “Delicacy” essay might be a hint that Whitman helped him find a new turning in his verse.² The essay breaks into four parts: Wright discusses the three types of delicacy—music, diction, form—he finds in...