[Although James Wright] was an extraordinarily sophisticated and erudite poet, he kept plenty of room in his heart for the humble virtues. A concordance will show that he was never too lofty to make frequent use of good and bad—words that have become members of an endangered verbal species. Bad has come to mean good, while good has slipped down to the C-minus range, above fair but below excellent and other hyperbolic superlatives. (p. 612)

So when I say that James Wright was a good poet, I am using his characteristic vocabulary and saying two things about goodness: Wright was a good man and he wrote well.

Those nine monosyllables are so easy for me to put down that there is some danger of our forgetting how hard it is to be good and to work well. Wright's books seem to bear the scars, stretch-marks, and trophies of...