Wright's stylistic odyssey is paradigmatic for his generation of American poets. His first two books, The Green Wall (1957) and Saint Judas (1959), are the work of a 1950s formalist chafing against formal disciplines. Strained, high-flown diction only occasionally relaxes, as though with a sigh of relief, into the plainness of everyday speech. The syntax is extended, convoluted—a snare in which the poet thrashes, gamely but helplessly. More than once the reader may have the disconcerting experience of coming to the bottom of a page and thinking a poem is over, only to turn the page and discover another two or three stanzas yet to go. The movement of such poems is like the galvanism that keeps a corpse's limbs twitching for some moments after the last breath has been drawn.

The milieu of these early poems—the industrial wasteland of southern Ohio—… is incongruous with the mandarin style...