SOURCE: “Re: Wright,” in The Kenyon Review, New Series XVIII, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 157-60.

In the following essay, Baker introduces a group of Wright's poems, asserting that his “work has yet to be appraised satisfactorily.”

We are building a huge cottage industry out of the ranking and aligning of cultural works and literary authors. The two Blooms—Harold and Allan—have constructed, quite independently, their lists of scholarly inclusions and exclusions. William Bennett has prescribed for us all his elixir of elitist medicine even as, like the Casey Kasem of poetry, William Harmon spins The Top 100 Poems out of his The Top 500 Poems. Everywhere: lists, orderings, preferences, reassessments, and rankings, thanks to the English departments, editors, publishers, and political action groups busily booming their canons and deconstructing everybody else's. Rightly enough, Harold Bloom laments that a work or writer may now be deemed canonical by someone's merely saying...