James Wright

James Arlington Wright (December 13, 1927 - March 25, 1980) was an American poet. James Wright was born and spent an unhappy childhood in Martins Ferry, Ohio. In 1946, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and participated in the occupation of Japan. Following his discharge, he attended Kenyon College on the GI Bill and published poems in the Kenyon Review. He graduated in 1965. Wright subsequently spent a Fulbright year in Vienna and obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Washington. Wright first emerged on the literary scene in 1956 with The Green Wall, a collection of formalist verse that was awarded the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. But by the early 1960s, Wright, increasingly influenced by the Spanish language surrealists, had dropped fixed meters. His transformation achieved its maximum expression with the publication of the seminal The Branch Will Not Break (1963), which positioned Wright as curious counterpoint to the Beats and New York Schools, which predominated on the American coasts. This transformation had not come by accident, as Wright had been working for years with his friend Robert Bly, collaborating on the translation of world poets in the influential magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties). Such influences fertilized Wright's unique perspective and helped put the Midwest back on the poetic map. Wright had discovered a terse, imagistic, free verse of clarity, and power. During the next ten years Wright would go on to pen some of the most beloved and frequently anthologized masterpieces of the century, such as "A Blessing," "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," and "I Am a Sioux Indian Brave, He Said to Me in Minneapolis."