272
PAUL ZWEIG
and twenty years old are offered once more, not as experimental
statements, but as works whose impact of surprise is long past, works
that must now stand on their own, as they will stand in future
anthologies. James Wright's
Collected Poems
surprised me in two
ways. I was startled to see how dated his early poems now seem.
The Green Wall
(1957) and
Saint Judas
(1959) are written in the
stilted pre-Raphaelite style that was fashionable in the 1950s. Aside
from an occasional line, in which Wright's gift for stark imagery
makes itself felt, these poems are disappointing today, and I think it
was a mistake to include so many of them in the present volume.
Wright's early language was so thickly idealized, the poems were so
elevated that one can only guess at the core of hurt and passion which
they suggest.
Wright's
cast of lost children, drunks, and the suffer–
ing
poor present, but is blurred by inflated rhetoric. The fact is that
Wright never mastered the formal style of the 1950s, as
Wilbur
and
Lowell did. When he broke free of it, to
write The Branch Will Not
Break,
he shucked off a
skin
that had never
fit.
On the other hand, I was surprised, too, at how uneven
The
Branch Will Not Break
and
Shall W e Gather At The River
now
seem, as volumes, although each contains a number of remarkable
poems. Wright helped to create a new poetic language, but he
him–
self was able to use it perfectly only now and then. All too often,
his poems founder in repetitious imagery. The word "dark," for ex–
ample, appears in almost every poem, as a code word for mystery
and the spiritual unknown. It is not long before "dark" becomes
what Raymond Queneau called a
mot valise,
a suitcase word: open
it up, and toss
in
whatever comes to hand. Instead of sharpening
perceptions, the
mot valise
confuses them, and it is not long before
the word itself dies of vagueness.
The poems are haunted by preciosity, a hold-over from Wright's
earlier books, disguised here as a mode of surrealism. The short
poem, "Spring Images," is an example:
Two athletes
Are dancing in the cathedral
Of the wind.
A butterfly lights on the branch
Of your green voice.
