The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland

Chapter Five. James Wright

five James Wright One day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for. Then the true passionate love for American soil will appear .As yet, there is too much menace in the landscape. —D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature Among Roethke’s students at the University of Washington during the s was James Wright, who remembered his teacher as “a genuine poet . . . one of the chosen ones” (Collected Prose, ). Later writers have come to think of Wright in similar terms. Born and raised in the industrial city of Martins Ferry, Ohio, across the Ohio River from West Virginia ,Wright was a self-described “jaded pastoralist” who saw the earth from the perspective of his native Ohio valley as “rifted paradise”: a beautiful place significantly degraded by human inhabitation and industry (, ).1 In his pastoral poetryWright struggles between contrary views of the humanized landscape, the human body, and the efficacy of poetry in making sense of a seemingly fallen world. Some of Wright’s poems are set in a pastoral paradise, like the “field of sunlight” in the poem “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” where even the “droppings of last year’s horses / Blaze up into golden stones” ().At such moments Wright tends to a Whitmanian physicality, as in the final lines of “Northern Pike”:“There must be something very beautiful in my body, / I am so happy” (). More  You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. often, however,Wright speaks of a “loneliness of body,” of “the rotting slit of my body,” analogous to the corruption of Ohio and its much-abused river (–). He despairs then of himself, of nature, and of the significance of his work as a poet. Lines from the poem “Many of Our Waters: Variations on a Poem by a Black Child” encapsulate Wright’s connection of landscape,body,and poetry.They are spoken to the polluted Ohio River, one of Wright’s major images and settings: Oh my back-broken beloved Ohio. I, too, was beautiful, once, Just like you. We were both still a little Young, then. Now, all I am is a poet, Just like you. () Wright is of a divided mind about Ohio, the Midwest, and America as a whole; his native country is by turns a garden and a graveyard. Torn between celebration and bereavement,Wright wishes alternately to embrace and escape place, person, and poetry, the sources of his joy and grief. This duality stemmed from both experience and temperament.Wright’s childhood coincided with the Great Depression, which hit hard in Martins Ferry and neighboring areas, depending as they did on coal mines, steel mills, and factories for employment. Dudley Wright, the poet’s father , was often laid off from his job at a glass company, and the family changed residences several times. “By the time I was ten years old,” Wright recalls in his “Childhood Sketch,”“we had lived in at least half a dozen houses, which were scattered apart from one another as widely as possible in a small town of , inhabitants” (Collected Prose, ). James C. Dougherty suggests that the “compassion and economic insecurity that characterize so many of Wright’s poems probably have their roots in the financial catastrophe” of the Depression ().Vagrants, criminals , and lonely poverty-stricken girls populate his work; anger at cruelty and sympathy for the abused and misunderstood characterize poems from every stage of his career.  The Midwestern Pastoral You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. From an early age,Wright wished to escape the landscape and society of his youth. “Our problem,” Wright told interviewer Dave Smith, “when we were boys in Martins Ferry, Ohio . . . was to get out” (Collected Prose, ). Wright’s ticket out was the army, which sent him straight from high school to occupied Japan in . In , he entered Kenyon College, from which he graduated in , the same year in which he published his first poem and married for the first time. In ,Wright began graduate studies at the...