Reading the Collected Poems of James Wright from the point of view of style is like reading a history of the best contemporary American poetry. One discovers a development which could be said to parallel the development generally of our finest recent poets…. [It is] a movement generally away from rhetoric, regular meter and rhyme, towards plainer speech, looser rhythms and few rhymes…. Not that the result is formlessness nor that the forms arrived at are alike. What one looks for is the individual voice, the distinctive style that is right for one poet but not quite right for any other.

James Wright has achieved such a style…. [Furthermore, his] poetry is sufficiently rich, both stylistically and thematically, to merit several voices. (p. 13)

Perhaps the most pervasive general theme in Wright's poetry—if theme it is—is that of separation. [In his first two volumes, The Green Wall...