Rutgers, Wright lived in Harlem, where he devel-
oped acquaintances with BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT
writers, including LeRoi Jones (AMIRI BARAKA). In
1966 Wright completed his Rutgers master’s de-
gree, writing a thesis on the 17th-century Spanish
baroque poet and dramatist Pedro Calderón.
Wright became a nomadic poet-scholar. After
another lengthy sojourn in Mexico, he moved to
Scotland to serve at Dundee University as the fel-
low in creative writing (1971–73). Returning to the
United States, he settled in New Hampshire and
taught at Yale (1975–79), where his colleagues in-
cluded the literary critic Harold Bloom, a cham-
pion of Wright’s poetry. Wright has also taught or
been writer-in-residence at Texas Southern Uni-
versity, Princeton, and Dartmouth.
Wright became a published author as early as
1964, when LANGSTON HUGHES included his poem
“This Morning” in New Negro Poets: USA. In 1967
Wright published a poetry chapbook titled Death
as History. His “The End of Ethnic Dream” and
“The Frightened Lover’s Sleep” appeared in the
ideologically militant BLACK FIRE: An Anthology
of Afro-American Writing (1968), edited by LeRoi
Jones (Amiri Baraka) and LARRY NEAL. A prolific
decade ensued for Wright, beginning in 1971 with
the publication of The Homecoming Singe, his first
novel, which was dedicated to black poet ROBERT
HAYDEN and to Harold Bloom. The Homecoming
was followed by Soothsayers and Omens (1976),
Explications and Interpretations (published in 1984
but written in the 1970s), Dimensions of History
(1976), and The Double Invention of Komo (1980).
Wright’s more recent publications are Elaine’s
Book (1988), Boleros (1991), and Transfigurations:
Collected Poems (2000), which includes a compila-
tion titled Transformations (1997). Wright’s plays
include Balloons: A Comedy in One Act (1968),
Love’s Equations (1983), and The Delights of Mem-
ory, I: Lily (1994).
Wright has several affinities with poet Robert
Hayden. The Spanish language and Mexican cul-
ture inform both Hayden’s and Wright’s sensi-
bility. As Hayden rejected what he took to be the
Black Arts poets’ artistically limiting and politi-
cally questionable nationalist aesthetic, so Wright
explores traditions of Africa, the Americas, and
Europe to elaborate an African-American heritage
that encompasses diverse historical antecedents
and cultural references. But perhaps the crucial
example Hayden set for Wright was Hayden’s at-
tempt in “Middle Passage” to imagine the path Af-
ricans journeyed through to become slaves, and so
the history of the “New World,” from a perspective
outside Eurocentric and white supremacist frame-
works. Wright redirects readers to think from such
a perspective. Beyond referring to diverse cultures,
Wright complexly bridges those cultures both to
retrieve connections with Africa, especially West
Africa’s indigenous religions and rituals, and to
create paths toward an unheard-of future.
Wright is avant-garde in his conceptually so-
phisticated yet intensely personal engagement
with the Americas’ cross-cultural past and global
multicultural future. For example, in “The Anat-
omy of Resonance,” from Elaine’s Book, epigraphs
from the German poets Friedrich Hölderlin and
Paul Celan instigate a meditation that accesses
Scottish, Christian, Aztec, Roman, and African
mythologies to achieve a poetic sublimity intimat-
ing deliverance from the past’s ethnocentric im-
passes. Confronting works such as “The Anatomy
of Resonance,” scholars realize that most exist-
ing critical paradigms are simply inadequate to
Wright’s poetry. Among scholars, perhaps Harold
Bloom has given Wright the highest praise. For
Bloom, Wright defines authentic multicultural au-
thorship, displays the most accomplished skills as
an African-American poet, is among the strongest
American poets, and may yet emerge as an Afri-
can-American Dante: an author of permanent im-
portance to world literature.
Besides accolades from scholars, Wright has
garnered literary honors and influenced other
African-American poets, including NATHANIEL
MACKEY and Cyrus Cassells. Wright’s honors in-
clude a National Council of the Arts grant (1967),
a Woodrow Wilson/National Endowment for the
Arts Poets-in-Concert fellowship (1968), a Prince-
ton Hodder fellowship (1970), an Ingram Merrill
Foundation Award (1974), two Guggenheim Fel-
lowships (1974 and 1975), a MacArthur FellowshipWright, Jay 565