[James Wright] was a poet of emotional extremes. Certain of his feelings—his overflowing compassion, and his lifelong loving preoccupations with his working-class origins—appealed to readers so strongly as to rule out a purely aesthetic judgment. At the same time, Wright was an exceedingly private poet, whose impulse was often to protect the object of his feeling even against the intrusion of his own words…. He probably changed the possibilities of American poetry more than any other poet of his generation except Ashbery and Ginsberg. The style which he, and his friend Robert Bly, invented—at once emotionalist and secretive, with its simple sentences, forbidden nineteenth-century words like "lovely," and opalescent, mysterious nature imagery—became for more than a decade the dominant mode of the American brief lyric. Yet it remains a conspicuously mannered style, derived neither from speech nor from traditionally fluent writing. Poignant though it...