James Arlington Wright

The life and work of a major American lyric poet described in his own words. This collection captures the exhilarating and moving correspondence between Wright and his many friends, beginning in 1946 in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, the hometown he would memorialize in verse, and ending in New York City, where he lived for the last fourteen years of his life. In letters to fellow poets Donald Hall, Theodore Roethke, Galway Kinnell, James Dickey, Mary Oliver, and Robert Bly, Wright explored subjects from his creative process to his struggles with depression and illness. Selected Letters is an epistolary chronicle of a significant part of the midcentury American poetry renaissance, as well as a biographical picture of a major American poet.--From publisher description.

"Wesleyan University Press ed." Contains all of James Wright's poetry, including The Green Wall, Saint Judas, The Branch Will Not Break, etc.

"Following James Merrill's widely celebrated Collected Poems and Collected Novels and Plays, this volume gives us the man himself and his straightforward exploration of how he became himself. As much as any poet of our time, Merrill conceived of his work and his life as warp and woof, and the prose collected here (from his juvenilia and occasional pieces through his critical writings to his interviews and memoir) shows how bound up in his craft (itself a recurrent topic) were his readings and reflections, his travels and friendships. Even Merrill's most devoted readers will be startled anew at the range of his aesthetic concerns and the depth of his knowledge. Dante and Ponge, Cavafy and Montale, Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens, all figure prominently here, and the volume is shot through with commentary on music, especially opera, and descriptions of the world's great cities - including New York, Paris, Istanbul, and Kyoto - and their cultural treasures. The volume closes resoundingly with A Different Person, Merrill's memoir of his young life, in which he travels to Europe to explore the culture, comes of age as a gay man, and faces down his legacy as the son of the renowned financier Charles E. Merrill."--Jacket.

In this final collection, which was left virtually complete at the time of his death, James Wright returns with haunting insistence to the themes that have become hallmarks of one of the enduring poetic voices of our time: the evocation of the author's Ohio childhood and youth; the intense, minute observation of the daily life of the classic culture of Italy, that any modern American poet has achieved.--Jacket blurb.