SOURCE: “‘A Dark River of Labor’: Work and Workers in James Wright's Poetry,” in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 22, No. 6, November-December, 1993, pp. 49-54.

In the following essay, Stein surveys the poems in which Wright confronts the industrial and economic exploitation of workers and landscape.

Many of James Wright's early poems introduced uncommonly common subjects, populated as they were by a murderer, a prostitute, a lesbian, an escaped convict, and an occasional drunk. Even W.H. Auden, who chose Wright's The Green Wall as the Yale Series winner, couldn't help but notice Wright's affinity for chronicling the lives of “social outsiders,” those who “play no part in ruling the City” and no part in making its “history.”¹ As Wright matured, beginning with the unpublished collection Amenities of Stone (1961-62) and its successor The Branch Will Not Break (1963), this attention took keener focus, often directing his eye to the “lives...