[James Wright is] at least in part a representative man whose poetics demonstrate what we mean by contemporary as both an extension of and a rebellion against modernism….

We live in a time when critical theory has called into question not merely the function of art but the very existence of art. Theorists deny there can be an author. From Derrida to Culler to Fish, the talk is of the text, an impersonal object neither story nor poem. The desire of such criticism … is to bring to literature the objectivity of scientific inquiry; that is, to codify what and how literature knows. This is the direction and legacy of New Criticism in part, of modernist rebellion in part—but it is largely the temperament of the industrial world. While criticism fabricates objectivity and impersonality, becoming at last not a way of experiencing art but a kind of parodic...