An introduction to twelve letters by James Wright.(A Selection of Letters: A Special APR Supplement)

JAMES WRIGHT'S LETTERS CHRONICLE MANY of the major innovations in American poetry in the middle of the twentieth century. They also provide a compelling personal narrative of his life. The following selection is taken from the forthcoming volume entitled A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright, published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. Nearly every one of Wright's letters exhibits his dedication to craft and passion for literature, and while each can be appreciated on its own, the first of the dozen letters below merits a brief comment.

In 1958, Pablo Neruda published the poem "Fabula de la sirena y los borrachos" in his book Extravagario. At the time, Wright did not translate the poem, but he never forgot it. Seventeen years later, when M. L. Rosenthal's translation appeared in these pages, Wright was moved to respond. In a letter sent in care of the editors at APR, Wright expressed his personal admiration to Rosenthal and his gratitude for the translation. This "Fable," it seems, had come to haunt Wright, and was bound up in his memories of Neruda.

Neruda's work became a touchstone for Wright, an ideal and an extreme. In a number of Wright's letters from the late fifties and early sixties, he places Neruda and Whitman at one pole and Edwin Arlington Robinson at the other, describing the pendulum of his own poetic allegiances. He was enthralled by the magnitude of Neruda's poems, and his memory of this one in particular suggests the tenacity of Wright's imagination.

The impulse to praise the work of others is a quality of his character, part of what prompted Wright's own translations and a proof of his devotion to poetry. His spontaneous letter of gratitude to M. L. Rosenthal has many parallels in Wright's biography. In July of 1958, Wright initiated a life-long friendship and correspondence with the poet and translator Robert Bly when he wrote to thank him for a gift copy of The Fifties, Bly's new magazine. Almost immediately, the two began collaborating on translations from the German of Georg Trakl. Wright also began an intensive study of Spanish, to read and translate for himself the work of Neruda, Cesar Vallejo and Juan Ramon Jimenez. Wright's own poetry was never the same.

In April of 1972, Wright met Neruda and took part in a reading with him at the 92nd St. Y in New York City. Wright considered this event one of the greatest honors of his life. Eighteen months later, Wright was in Venice and witnessed daily protests against the United States as word spread of the overthrow of Allende's government in Chile. On September 23, 1973, he learned of Neruda's death. Wright and his second wife, Anne, visited the Adriatic fishing town of Grado the following week, where he wrote his "imitation" of Neruda, "A Visit to the Earth." Wright's elegy to him also dates from that time. Both poems appear in the Appendix to A Wild Perfection, which gathers thirty previously uncollected poems, drafts and translations of Wright's that he refers to in his correspondence.

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The following letters span the last twenty-two years of James Wright's life. The earliest ones, from 1958, include a detailed account of a manuscript for his second book, Saint Judas, as well as the first two letters of Wright's intense and fascinating exchange with the poet, critic and novelist James Dickey. These are followed by a poignant autobiographical letter written to his high school Latin teacher in 1972. From the summer of 1976 are letters to Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell and Donald Hall, as Wright was working on the last book he would see into print, To a Blossoming Pear Tree. The selection concludes with Wright's final letter, written to Galway Kinnell on December 31, 1979.