The American Century: Literature since 1945 537off the “sticky infusion” of speech and becomes one with the natural world
(“The Bear”) or participates in the primal experiences of birth (“Under the Maud
Moon”) and death (“How Many Nights”). The tone of James Wright’s work is
quieter, less prophetic than this, but he too attempts to unravel from his own uncon-
scious the secret sources of despair and joy. Of another poet whom he admired,
Georg Trakl, Wright said this: “In Trakl, a series of images makes a series of events.
Because these events appear out of their ‘natural’ order, without the connection we
have learned to expect from reading the newspapers, doors silently open to unused
parts of the brain.” This describes the procedures of many of Wright’s own poems,
which evolve quietly through layers of images until they surface with the quick
thrust of a striking final image or epiphany. For instance, in “Lying in a Hammock
at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” Wright carefully annotates his
surroundings. “Over my head,” he begins, “I see the bronze butterfly / Asleep on
the black trunk / Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.” The vision of the butterfly
suggests a being wholly at one with the world: entrusted, pliable, possessed of
the stillness of a plant or even a mineral (“bronze”). This feeling persists into the
following lines through the subtle harmonizing of time and space (“the distances of
afternoon”) and the sense of cowbells, heard from far off, as the musical measure of
both. It is growing late, however, and as “evening darkens” a succession of images toll
the poet back to his sole self. The last two lines complete the series and confirm the
discovery: “A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. / I have wasted my life.”
The hawk, presumably, will find its home; it possesses the ease, the buoyancy and
assurance, that characterize the other natural objects in this landscape. But the poet
will not. He can see in the things of this world only a vivid, subliminal reminder of
ruin, his failure truly to live. Surprising though this last line may seem, it has been
carefully prepared for by the hidden agenda of the poem; the images that constitute
the argument, strange and emotionally precise as they are, have opened the doors to
this revelation.
While writers such as Wright and Kinnell have tried to register the movements of
the subconscious, others have dramatized the personal in more discursive, conscious
forms. These include poets like Richard Hugo (1923–1982), Karl Shapiro, and Louis
Simpson, who explore the self ’s discovery of the outer world and its reaction to it
and, rather more significant, those like John Logan (1923–1987), Adrienne Rich
(1929–), Anne Sexton (1923–1974), and W. D. Snodgrass (1926–2009), who
incorporate elements of their personal histories in their poems. In the poetry of
Richard Hugo, collected in 1984, the personal dimension is founded on the
relationship between the private self of the poet and the bleak, lonesome world he
describes. The setting he favors is the Far West: not the Far West of legend, however,
but a far more inhospitable, emptier place. Looking at one decaying township in
Montana, he asks himself, “Isn’t this your life?”; and his own poetic voice, somber
and laconic, seems to answer him in the affirmative. Yet he can also learn from his
surroundings; their strength of spirit, “rage” and endurance, have stamped their
mark on him. “To live good, keep your life and the scene,” he concludes in
“Montgomery Hollow,” “ / Cow, brook, hay: these are the names of coins”:GGray_c05.indd 537ray_c 05 .indd 537 8 8/1/2011 7:31:30 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 30 PM