James Wright

James Wright 1927-80, American poet, b. Ohio. He studied at Kenyon College and the Univ. of Washington. The master of an elegant, beautifully controlled style, his early poems contained surrealistic juxtapositions. Later works abandoned willed complexity in favor of a plainer diction. His works include The Green Wall (1957), Shall We Gather at the River? (1968), To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977), and the posthumous The Shape of Light (1986).

Bibliography: See his collected prose, ed. A. Wright (1982).

Wright, James [Arlington] (1927–80), Ohio‐born poet, graduated from Kenyon College, received a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, and from 1966 on taught at Hunter College. His first book, The Green Wall (1957), in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, was followed by Saint Judas (1959), The Lion's Tail and Eyes (1962), The Branch Will Not Break (1963), Shall We Gather at the River? (1968), Collected Poems (1971, Pulitzer Prize), Two Citizens (1973), Moments of the Italian Summer (1976), To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977), and This Journey (1982), whose poems are heavily imaged and often formal. His complete collected poems were incorporated in Above the River (1990).