PARTISAN REVIEW
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foreign to English or American tradition could help us to establish
new modes of language.
Wright's visionary ,landscapes were anchored in the American
scene by a litany of place-names. But it is a spiritualized America,
haunted by drunks, lost children, and dead Indians; an America
short-circuited by despair, whose very forms breathe sleepily with
the rhythms of nightmare:
Somewhtre in a vein of Bridgeport, Ohio;
Deep in a coal hill behind Hanna's name,'
Below the tipples, and dark as a drowsy woodchuck,'
A man, alone,
Stumbles upon the outside locks ofa grave, whispering
Oh let me in.
- "Miners"
Wright managed to bring into a single focus his vision of the ghosts
in the land and the ghosts in the mind. He proposed a new connec–
tion between feelings and events; a pantheism of suffering which
illuminated the inward and outward spaces alike. The miner stum–
bling in a dark tunnel in Bridgeport, Ohio, is stumbling in the closed
spaces of the psyche; he inhabits the underworld of America, and
the poet's buried self. In Wright's vision, the two are one.
The attempt to create a new religious idiom is underscored by
the tit:le of Wright's next book,
Shall We Gather At The River.
The
title has a chilling irony in Wright's work. One imagines a group
of hymn-singing settlers intimidated by the emptiness of the Mid–
western sky, and the vast spaces of land stretching around them. They
huddle together, and sing "shall we gather at the river." Their hymn
is
also a prayer, and there is defiance in their voices, for they be–
lieve that God is listening. In Wright's prayer-poems, the hymn is
launched sadly, because there is no one listening. The title
Shall We
Gather At The River
contains a genuine question. Perhaps it is no
use to huddle together and sing. Perhaps (to quote Cesar Vallejo)
"God is sick," or perhaps He is an alien presence, "a red spider,"
as Wright says. J ames Wright is haunted by "loneliness," by a wish
to gather at the river in a community of singing, although he know:s
that such a gathering must fail.
By collecting his work into a single volume, a poet invites a
different sort of reading than he has received previously. Poems ten
