SOURCE: “‘To Step Lightly, Lightly, All the Way through Your Ruins’: James Wright's Ohio Poems,” in The Midwest Review, Vol. XXXVII, No. 4, Summer, 1996, pp. 353-64.

In the following essay, Davis argues that Wright transcends the geographical places he writes about in his poetry by transforming them into metaphorical images.

In her essay, “Places in Fiction,” Eudora Welty says that “[p]lace is one of the lesser angels that watch over the … hand” of all writing and that “as soon as we step down from the general view to the close and particular, as writers must and readers may,” to try to determine “what good writing may be, place can be seen … to have a great deal to do with that goodness, if not to be responsible for it” (116). Welty is careful to distinguish between a “sense of place” in writing and “regional” writing. She calls the term “regional...