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PAUL ZWEIG
fairytale, and what it means can hardly be rephrased: a sense of the
quietness which events can never touch, a meeting of the wheat's
darkness and the darkness within.
The Branch
Will
Not Break
was one of the key books of the
early 1960s. Wright's imagery possessed a visionary quality which
many poets felt to be an alternative to the elaborate, formal rhetoric
of Wilbur and Lowell. Lines like the following triggered off waves
of response:
Tonight,
The cancerous ghosts of old con men
Shed their leaves.
- "Two Poems About President Harding"
Women are dancing around a fire
By a pond of cresosote and waste water from the river
In the dank fog of Ohio.
They are dead.
I am alone here,
And I reach for the moon that dangles
Cold on a dark vine.
- "Message Hidden in an Empty Wille Bottle . .. "
This time, I have left my body behind me, crying
In its dark thorns.
Still,
There are good things in this world.
It is dusk.
It is the good darkness
Of women's hands that touch dark loaves.
The spirit of a tree begins to move.
I touch leaves.
I close my eyes, and think of water.
- "Trying to Pray"
The mingling of pastoral with Gothic mystery recalls Roethke, but
in
a tighter, more contained manner. One senses the influence of
Wright's work as a translator. The German poet Georg Trakl seems
especially to have helped Wright to reshape his language toward the
somber simplicity of these lines. Along with Robert Bly, Wright
was
in part responsible for popularizing poets like Trakl, Vallejo, and
Neruda in America. At a time when American poets were casting
about for new models, he was able to give an example of how poets
