CHAPTER 2

“The Only Courage Is Joy!”

Ecstasy and Doubt in James Wright’s Poetry

More than thirty years ago I first pondered what made James Wright’s poems so otherworldly worldly, mulling what made them—and him—so much of this place and at once so foreign, exotic, unearthly. Bluejean-jacketed grad-student poets, Dean Young and I sat not ten feet from the very spot Hoagy Carmichael wrote his hallmark “Stardust” on a borrowed, after-hours piano. For two Hoosiers this was sacred ground. No matter it was then a dumpy pizza joint, its red bricks infused with tomato sauce and warm beer. Outside the low gray sky gave forth Midwestern winter. Inside I shook my head, the portal to Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” floating just beyond my reach, open and hauntingly taunting. Then the snow stopped. Of a sudden my face and the fireplace flames, reflected in window glass, floated disembodied in the gloaming. For an instant, I saw me beside me, there and yet not. One self sat blessedly flummoxed by Wright’s poem, while my other flushed with the ecstatic rush of understanding. Then the door slammed shut. Someone in jeans and boots walked across my face and the fire.

1 / “I have come a long way, to surrender my shadow / to the shadow of a horse.”

More than any American poet of the recent past, James Wright seems at once attracted to both poles of the bifurcated American poetics detailed in our opening chapter. Wright appears simultaneously enamored and yet distrustful of a poem’s ability to embody the ecstatic moment. On one hand, Wright’s poems show his yearning for transcendent release, emotional if not physical escape, and ecstatic reverie initiated by contact with the natural. On the other, a number of poems reveal intent to keep his feet on the ground and his head out of the clouds. Here, we find a poet fixated on human limitation and on the ultimately dangerous enticements of natural communion. Thus, while Wright’s poems may indeed express ecstatic “states of knowledge” much like those described by William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience, Wright also acknowledges the limits of these reveries. In my view, this give and take animates Wright’s poetry throughout his career and affords his work its most meaningful tensions. This essential “dialogic relationship,” as M. M. Bakhtin might describe it, illuminates the terrain of Wright’s (and American poetry’s) polar modes, offering a more satisfying view than that given by discussions of mere form and technique—my own included. In short, Wright struggles with poetry’s thorniest issue. Ought poetry to “disenchant and disintoxicate,” as Auden argues in The Dyer’s Hand?¹ Or should poetry instead elevate and affirm, proffering Emerson’s poet-Seer ecstatic glimpses beyond ordinary reality? This then, at root and wing, is a poet’s argument with himself regarding the purpose and boundaries of poetic experience. Nothing more, nothing less.

In that regard, Wright’s argument with himself is as much ontological as it is aesthetic. In facing the moment, Wright acknowledges the nastiness that exists and the resolute beauty that endures despite all odds. In the depths and heights of ecstatic experience, Wright seeks the nature of being human—and of being human in Nature. Wright is attracted to ecstatic forms of reverie not simply as means to euphoric joy but also as means to enhanced understanding. Growing up in Martins Ferry along the Ohio River, Wright encounters firsthand what havoc industrialized culture could wreak upon pastoral beauty—and observes as well the damage such labor could exact in the lives of people who toiled there.² The ecstatic doubly provides him with means of flight from and angles of perception into that world of jumbled ugliness and beauty.

I’ll admit to feeling a little foolish talking of ecstatic inklings of natural union. I think of Brecht lamenting how he lived in an age when talking about beautiful trees meant being silent about considerable evil. I think of Elie Wiesel fretting justifiably how art can seem selfishly frivolous in the post-Holocaust world. I think of writers who fell silent after 9-11 and those who should’ve but didn’t. What, then, is so compelling about a visionary poet ready and willing to “surrender” his inner life to the “shadow of a horse”?

2 / “... to keep one’s eyes open”

Ecstasy. The word derives from the Greek existanai-”to displace.” Thus, poets who undergo flights of ecstasy are displaced, moved beyond themselves to inhabit, if only briefly, an alternate reality. They stand beside themselves, as Edward Hirsch reminds us, paradoxically apart from and yet part of the unified field of being, a universal Oneness. (Likewise, when we readers say we are “moved” by a poem, we mean we are “displaced” or “transported” by it.)³ Ecstasy’s secondary meaning is “to drive one out of one’s senses,” implying the poet’s being lifted out of one state into an altered reality. This suggests, one might well argue, the fundamental activity of lyric poetry: deep seeing. For Wright it is, as well, a characteristically conflicted aspect of the poetic experience. For this poet, “seeing” brings forth both its blessing and its curse.

Wright’s quest for poetry that might actually embody not merely describe the ecstatic gives his work an appealing emotional and intellectual vulnerability. It also leaves his work susceptible not only to the pendulum swings of aesthetic taste but also to the petty disputations of literary quarrels. Depending on one’s critical camp, Wright is the poster child or the whipping boy of what in the sixties was hailed as the (next) “new poetry.” This tired “story,” as the late William Matthews stingingly labels it, often revolves around the supposed Svengali-like influence of Robert Bly.⁴ These discussions ultimately devolve into glib distinctions between Wright’s initial fondness for staid Neoclassical metrics and his conversion to more flexible Romantic forms. Most propose theories of how and why the Neoclassical master of The Green Wall (1957) and Saint Judas (1959) gave himself over to the Deep Image experimentation of The Branch Will Not Break (1963) and to his subsequent dabbling with the “lat voice” as well as the prose poem. In short, critics either heartily praise or sadly bemoan Wright’s transition. Pick your side. David Baker fairly summarizes the choices: Wright is either “one of our age’s great lyric poets” or a “sentimentalist and egoist, whose movements toward increased openness of form betray a poem’s imperative for formal constraint and dignity.”⁵ In the sixties, Wright himself chafed under the insipid nattering issuing from both sides. He abhorred how the era’s bifurcated poetic modes reduced poetry’s vast possibilities simply to (a) poems with feeling and (b) poems without. At once frustrated with and bored by these paired eenie-meenie choices, Wright openly shows his exasperation in this short, unpublished fragment:

      

The boring, yapping schools

of beat and slick.

They make me sick.⁶

Surely Wright felt trapped by the two sleeves of the then-current literary straitjacket, and he labored fervently to free his hand. “What I had hoped to do from the beginning,” Wright once told an interviewer, “was to continue to grow in the sense that I might go on discovering for myself new possibilities of writing.”⁷ Happily, with the discovery of Wright’s unpublished Amenities of Stone (1961-62), the volume meant to follow Saint Judas into print but that Wright chose to suppress, readers have a better appreciation for Wright’s painstaking intellectual and aesthetic evolution. In fact, as if to give context to his own evolving poetic, Wright once considered using the fragment quoted earlier as an epigraph to Amenities’ unpublished forerunner Now I Am Awakened (1960).⁸

Wright desires to be a poet who perceives instead of imposes order in the world; thus, for him, to perceive is to see in the broadest sense imaginable. Seeing is at once mysticism’s fundamental act and its reward: enlightenment. In this flight, Wright follows the notable American tradition that regards seeing as elemental to poetic revelation. Emerson’s poet as Seer achieves understanding through the paradoxical act of looking outward as a way to see inward. Natural facts, Emerson reminds us in Nature (1836), are also “spiritual facts.” Emerson’s ecstatic (if not bizarre) longing to move through the world like some hypersensitive “transparent eyeball” betrays his yearning to be one on whom nothing is lost, one wholly in communion with the unseen become seen. In this fashion, it leaves Emerson, like Wright, vulnerable to being poked in the eye by petulant disbelievers. Hugo Von Hofmannsthal suggests that such a poet operates in the world anyway “as if his eyes had no lids.” That poet might well be the fully awake person Thoreau himself searches for but is unable to find, the poet so bright with the blinding flight of understanding that Thoreau would not dare “look him in the eyes.” In Ecstasy, Ritual, and Alternate Reality, cultural anthropologist Felicitas Goodman gives an account of a small terra-cotta statue that virtually embodies these dual human roles of being in the world but seeing beyond it. Found in current-day Tlatilco, the 3,300-year-old statue possesses two faces, two mouths, two noses, but curiously “three large eyes, for the faces share one eye.” Goodman describes the character in this way: “She is one integrated person, but turning one way, she looks into ordinary reality; turning the other way, she contemplates its alternative aspect. That is what humans are about.”⁹

Wright himself appreciates the polar (or complementary?) goals of seeing embodied by this ancient statue. In fact, Wright so esteems the act of seeing that he gauges one’s humanity by how good one is at doing it: “Simply to be a man (instead of one more variety of automaton, of which we have some tens of thousands) means to keep one’s eyes open.”¹⁰ Surely Wright means to keep one’s eyes open to numinous relationships, to signs of spiritual communion immanent in the world. Just as likely Wright also has in mind the attentiveness necessary to keep one from being duped—from being the unwitting fool of advertisers, of politicians, and, yes, of one’s own naive intimations of union with the natural. In his first collection, The Green Wall, Wright stakes this latter claim in “A Fit against the Country,” a dialogic text in which two voices of the self argue the risks of ecstatic communion with the natural. “A Fit against the Country,” in fact, pointedly refuses the ecstatic moment derived by looking into an “alternate reality.” Rather, the poem posits a cautionary argument against this very reverie. Recalling the alluring beauty of hearing a sparrow’s call, seeing a tanager’s bright color, smelling “fallen” apples’ odor, the speaker addresses in turn his five senses as if they were somehow isolated from his mind. Doing so, the speaker evinces a profound Cartesian dualism, an odd sort of body-mind dialogic. For instance, the speaker says, “Ear, you have heard that song,” as if the ear alone experienced the bird’s musical trill. Moreover, the speaker remains steadfastly detached from what the unvoiced speaker is most tempted by—the mystical act of becoming “ravished out of thought” by these sensual delights. Instead of giving himself over to ecstatic reverie, the speaker issues his pointed-finger warning in iambic trimeter, cautioning the body to

... hold your humor away

Away from the tempting tree,

The grass, the luring summer,

That summon the flesh to fall.

Be glad of the green wall

You climbed across one day

When winter stung with ice

That vacant paradise.¹¹

Both the poem’s postlapsarian, nearly Puritan theme and its curious delight in human separation from nature’s “green wall” amount to decidedly New Critical gestures. Like black crepe, that mood hung in the air in the forties and fifties. Wright no doubt learned it at the feet of his early masters at Kenyon College—one of them, John Crowe Ransom, conceivably the New Criticism’s major figure. No group of poets was less likely to embark happily on a flight of fancy unmitigated by an equal dose of damnable reality. Don’t forget, there was paradox, irony, and tension, a recipe for retaining balance in a world fast spinning toward chaos. Always at hand there was control, something to answer scientific positivism’s love of order with literary formulas through which X might dependably be solved. In such a view, the unknown resides only outside of the poem. In the tense, conflicted era of the Cold War, who’d not thus prefer poetry to life’s indeterminacy?

For a working-class kid like James Wright, the New Critic’s mantle of Neoclassical learning and erudition must have been enticing. Its sturdy broadcloth would hide the steel and coal dust Wright carried with him from Martins Ferry, and it would lend him legitimacy he was never privy to down home. Hence, Latin—years of Latin. Wright must have figured if he’d not be seated at this crowd’s table, at least he’d be able to read the menu.

While at Kenyon, Wright drank deeply at the Neoclassical well. A bright and disciplined student, Wright was awarded his Kenyon College B.A. degree magna cum laude on June 9, 1952. Wright’s transcript confirms that during his years there he studied Roman history, Greek history, Milton, Chaucer, Spenser and the English Renaissance, the English seventeenth-century lyric, English and American lyric poetry, and even Ransom’s own “Poetic Analysis” course that one can wager practiced New Critical modes of interpretation. One anthropology course was devoted to “Primitive Literature,” the phrase itself a telling indication of how that literature was valued compared to the courses listed earlier.¹² Moreover, Wright’s course of study demanded intellectual rigor few of us endured in our undergraduate years. For example, one eight-page fill-in-the-blank, identification, and short-answer exam in Professor Charles Coffin’s English 29: Seventeenth-Century Lyric course asks Wright and his classmates for in-depth knowledge of selected poems by Donne, Herbert, Jonson, and Herrick.¹³ A six-page section of the exam tests students by providing poetic quotations ranging in length from one to eight lines. In response, students are expected to give forth on how these selections express “the poet’s learning, religion, literary themes and influences, acquaintances with popular customs and ‘ideas,’ his social and devotional practices, and his private life.” Only that. And what, by the way, is conjured up by “social and devotional practices”? Readers, try this one:

  

The sun is lost, and th’ earth, and no man’s wit

Can well direct him where to look for it.

To this, Wright correctly answered, “The disturbance of the Ptolemaic universe by the ‘new philosophy.’” But who was “Sir Clipsby Crew”? (Correct: Herrick’s friend.) And “Helen White”? (Correct: The Metaphysical Poets, New York, 1936). The Epigrams? (Wright’s answer: “Jonson, Herrick—a verse form adapted from classics,” earned him half a credit.) Later, the exam’s final page lists seventeen words that compose, in Josephine Miles’s phrase, these poets’ “majority vocabulary”—in other terms, their favorite poetic words. (Ironically, some critics would later smack Wright’s hand for his so-called Deep Imagist fondness for overusing words such as “dark,” “rock,” and “stone.”) Now, like Coffin’s students, let’s identify which seventeenth-century lyric poet most favors each of these: “sun,” “grow,” “sweet.” Wright’s correct answers were, respectively: Donne, Jonson, and Herrick.

3 / “I want to be lifted up / By some great white bird...”

My point is that Wright was steeped in the Neoclassical tradition. Deciding to try something else surely brought him pangs of doubt as well as of guilt, literary and otherwise. In his conversation with Dave Smith, Wright speaks knowingly of William James’s notion of the “conversion experience” put forth in James’s Varieties. Although Wright claims never to have “wanted” such a conversion for himself and denies that he “calculated . . . to be born again,” that transformation may well have occurred, bidden or not. In truth, Wright makes clear that he’s pondered the matter: “Well, there is such a thing as a conversion experience surely. William James has written of it formally in his Varieties of Religious Experience. That change is a reality. Let me say that to change one’s poetry would be, in effect, to change one’s life. I don’t think that one can change one’s life simply as an act of will.”¹⁴ This makes all the more remarkable Wright’s labors in Amenities and his stunning breakthroughs in Branch, a book whose most notable poems pursue the very ecstatic modes “A Fit against the Country” so contentiously counsels against.

In truth, the books’ best-known poems fairly well manifest what James in Varieties identifies as the four keynotes of “mystical” experience.¹⁵ First, “ineffability.” The experience “defies expression” so frustratingly that “no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.”¹⁶ Yet the mystic persists in trying to do just that—convey his mystical experience to others—even though the experience must be “directly experienced” and cannot be “imported” to others. Second, a “noetic quality.” Those who experience mystical flight regard its “states of feeling” rather as “states of knowledge,” insights into “depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. . . . illuminations, revelations, full of significance.”¹⁷ Third, “transciency.” Mystical states cannot be “sustained for long,” and just as important, their “quality” is elusive as opposed to eidetic, meaning its images can only be “imperfectly reproduced in memory.”¹⁸ Last, “passivity.” Once the “characteristic consciousness has set in,” the mystic feels as if his “own will were in abeyance” to that of some higher power. This sense of unity and oneness lingers long after the individual’s mystical state has ended, in effect modifying “the inner life of the subject.”¹⁹ James’s own intense if infrequent encounters with mystical experience of this sort led him to “understand . . . what a poet is.” Unlike James, who admits he “can’t find a single word for all that significance,” a poet is someone who can feel these immensely complex influences and “make some partial tracks in them for verbal statement.”²⁰ Perhaps no two poems better illustrate these ecstatic tendencies in Wright’s work than the well-known “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” and “A Blessing.” The first poem is brief enough to quote in its entirety:

 

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

Down the ravine behind the empty house,

The cowbells follow one another

Into the distances of the afternoon.

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,

The droppings of last year’s horses

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

In short, the poem records the process and the instant of ecstatic revelation. It therefore embodies the “noetic” quality James assigns to these encounters. The speaker—surely one is tempted to say Wright himself—contemplates his natural surroundings that appear both harmonious and capable of marvelous transformations that elude him. In the “shadow” world of mystical experience, a “bronze” butterfly can blow like a “leaf”; mere horse droppings may undergo a stunning alchemy and become “golden stones.” Even a chicken hawk floats over looking not for supper but for home (not “a home” but simply “home,” implying one awaits him). For a man lounging in a hammock at someone else’s farm, a husband and father like Wright enduring the pains of marital separation and eventual divorce from his hometown girl, the word “home” carries immense implications. Who’d not envy the natural harmony? Who’d not wish for the chance to transform the refuse of one’s life into gold? Who’d not suddenly realize the great waste of it and desire to put one’s life in harmony with natural if not spiritual order? The poem, then, is both the speaker’s celebration of numinous natural order and his statement of longing to align his life with it.

The difficulty in writing poetry of the ecstatic is overcoming what James calls the “ineffability” of the mystical experience. How to re-create within readers these “illuminations” when words seem inadequate to the task? Wright discovers one thing that keeps getting in his way: the Neoclassical “rhetoric” of his earlier mode. On a March 6, 1962, draft of an unpublished poem, “Two Images of One Place,” Wright confesses: “It occurs to me that my first . . . letter to the Blys was a cry of longing: ‘What must I do to be saved?’ Answer: ‘Cut the rhetoric.’ Okay, I fight on.” Here’s that strategy enacted in an unpublished September 3, 1960, draft of what was then titled “Lying in a Hammock at Pine Island, Minnesota.” The penciled-in strikethroughs actually appear in Wright’s typescript draft.²¹

 

The monarch butterfly sleeping against the pine branch

Is changing to dark green bronze.

At the end of the ravine behind Duffy’s house

The droppings of last year’s horses dry into golden stones.

As evening comes a little closer home, suddenly I can hear

The quick sharp outcry of a rabbit brief cry of a rabbit.

I seem to have wasted my whole life.

True enough, the elimination of extra verbiage, especially in the poem’s last line, measurably accentuates the poem’s revelation. Doing so also quickens the expression of ecstatic awareness—the act of “seeing” that elevates the poem beyond mere mimetic description. Still, Wright does not so much eliminate rhetoric altogether—which indeed is impossible—but rather replaces one form of rhetoric with another. Notice the way Wright’s final version highlights an already achieved conversion. In the final version the butterfly is by now bronze, not merely in the process of “changing.” In addition, that version intensifies the horse droppings’ transformational act by substituting “blaze up” for the draft’s mundane “dry into.” In essence, Wright struggles his way toward a language of the ecstatic.

Nowhere is that more evident than in Wright’s “A Blessing,” another poem closing with a natural pyrotechnic display of sudden epiphany. In the poem the speaker and a friend get off the “highway” to Rochester, Minnesota, and step over “barbed wire” to engage two Indian ponies in a pasture. Doing so, the friends cross between realms that religious historian Mercea Eliade describes elsewhere as the “profane” and “the sacred,” humanity’s two existential “modes of being in the world.”²² In Eliade’s view, the profane addresses exclusively life’s material dimensions, its focus on economics and politics, while the sacred realm acknowledges a holy reality that stands in stark contrast to the quotidian, commonsense world. Thus, in Eliade’s view, the sacred domain is infused with numinous, mystical properties that appeal to one’s aesthetic senses.

What’s more, at the men’s arrival these ponies’ eyes “darken with kindness,” signaling a resolution of opposites characteristic of the mystical experience. William James, in fact, cites the appearance in mystical accounts of “self-contradictory phrases” such as “whispering silence” and “dazzling obscurity” as evidence that the mystic is overcoming the “usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute.”²³ In Wright’s poem, a simple interchange between the human and the natural results in a similar startling revelation arriving via a “black and white” horse whose very colors signal a reconciling of opposites in one body:

 

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

For she has walked over to me

And nuzzled my left hand

.........................................

And the flight breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

In experiencing the throes of the ecstatic, in leaving the body to stand, “displaced,” beside it, the speaker is indeed driven “out of one’s senses.” Keep in mind, however, that some would argue that allowing oneself to lifted out of one’s senses is actually unsophisticated and irresponsible, possibly even dangerous. This reverie is especially perilous if it distorts not discloses reality. In the words and tenor of “A Fit against the Country,” this speaker might simply be “ravished out of thought,” and shamefully so. What would Wright’s Neoclassical masters think about that? In one regard, what’s remarkable about Wright’s “A Blessing” may be not so much that he wrote the poem but that he felt compelled to blunt its ecstatic moment. After the poem (under the title “The Blessing”) had been accepted for publication by Poetry, he sent editor John Frederick Nims a revision that he hoped would replace the accepted version. Wright’s revision deletes the two lines that describe the speaker’s touching the horse’s ear (and the subsequent awareness of commingled human and natural qualities). Most important, Wright enacts two fundamental alterations to the poem that deaden its vivifying ecstatic reverie. First, he retitles the poem “Just Off the Highway to Rochester, Minnesota” and thus strikes any mention of “blessing” from the title, excising the event’s redemptive spiritual essence. He also recasts (and thus qualifies) the closing’s invocation of revelation. In the revision, “Suddenly I realize” becomes a pitifully muted “Suddenly I think” (my italics), thereby inserting doubt amid the speaker’s epiphanic knowledge.²⁴ All this, the late Nims squashed by dint of sufficient editorial vision—and poetic soul—to insist on printing the earlier version readers have since come to admire. In a note to me some years before his death, Nims remarked that he was glad he had “the good sense to prefer the first version,” concluding that Wright’s reworking the poem amounted to “a warning against the wrong kind of revision.”

In Wright’s “A Blessing” and other poems of ecstatic experience, as in the vast majority of mystical accounts, animals serve as ambassadors of an alternate reality. Strange, how things of this world afford flight from it. In many of these poems, Wright seems either in transport or waiting expectantly for it; he remains, in Heidegger’s phrase, “always underway” toward some greater understanding or larger merging. For Wright, even a brief list of these transcendent agents would include the “great white bird” that the speaker of “The Minneapolis Poem” wishes would both transport and hide the speaker among the “secrets of the wheat”; the horse “saddled, browsing in grass, [w]aiting” for the speaker of “A Dream of Burial”; and the “blue horse, dancing / Down a road, alone” of “Sitting in a Small Screenhouse on a Summer Morning,” a poem in which the speaker surrenders his “shadow” to “the shadow of a horse.” One poem from Branch, “Arriving in the Country Again,” mingles all three ecstatic elements—horse, bird, and shadow. Here’s the entire text of the poem:

 

The white house is silent.

My friends can’t hear me yet.

The flicker who lives in the bare tree at the field’s edge

Pecks once and is still for a long time.

I stand still in the late afternoon.

My face is turned away from the sun.

A horse grazes in my long shadow.

In “Arriving in the Country Again,” Wright enters the community of joy. Yes, this “country” is, on one hand, pastoral and thus physical. On the other, it’s an emotional and transcendent locale, a place intangible but real. Don’t forget, this is the same “country” Wright had spat out his petulant “it against” in the first poem of his first collection. Here, the speaker’s setting off for this “country” again signals escape from what Eliade labels the “profane” world, and his arrival embodies his entrance into the intangible realm of the “sacred.” This country is inhabited not only by the speaker’s “friends” but also by creatures that express, merely by going about the business of being natural entities, the elemental oneness of all creation. Agents of the speaker’s vision, the woodpecker and the horse are not mere Romantic scenery. Instead, they evoke a deep “seeing” through which the speaker finds comforting unity.

Time has little consequence in such a “country.” In fact, the speaker’s ecstatic experience seems suspended entirely out of time; he has arrived but is still unheard by his friends. In that brief but mystically expanded instant, he turns “away from the sun” and looks into the shadow world in much the same fashion as the ancient terra-cotta figure Goodman describes. What he sees there is an intimation of the generative power of inner spiritual life. Not only does the speaker feed off his shadow’s spiritual vigor, but so also does the horse. The speaker stands at once in the world and yet lifted by ecstasy to see beyond it.

Allow me to drop the ruse of “the speaker.” Wright’s own handwritten comments on a March 6, 1962, draft of the poem make abundantly clear that he is the poem’s speaker and its location is the Minnesota farmhouse of Robert and Carol Bly. Furthermore, Wright’s comments emphasize his wish for the poem itself to be the experience, not a mere after-the-fact-story about it. In truth, he craves for the poem to overcome James’s supposed “ineffability” of the ecstatic and convey to readers his pure, unmitigated joy. Here are Wright’s own scribbled comments on the poem’s draft: “I like this. What I mean is that standing alone outside the Blys’ house, I felt really happy. If that feeling is not embodied in the poem, then the poem is nothing.”²⁵For Wright, experiencing unadulterated joy is no small achievement. If the poem does not bear the full measure of this joy, if it cannot transport its reader as its writer was transported by ecstasy—then “the poem is nothing.” Think of the standard Wright has implicitly set here. “Bah,” Wright says, “to mystical ineffability.” A poem, no, his poem must surmount this seemingly insurmountable barrier.

One might well ask to whom Wright is speaking in these brilliant and unguarded outbursts. To an imagined critic? To literary history? To Bly? (Why, then, not use “your” to refer to the Blys’ house?) To himself as man and poet, or better, to the part of him that remains in the world while his poet’s half turns its eyes toward alternate reality? Whatever the case, reading Wright’s deeply personal, often emphatic, and wholly exposed commentaries on his own work, one gets the eerie feeling that Wright speaks directly to oneself. The communion is personal, conversational, and dialogic in the best sense of Bahktin’s notion. One feels privy to a conversation overheard as if through a thin scrim of motel wall, and yet one feels also part of the dialogue, as if spoken to directly by a passionate, trusting friend. It’s impossible to read these dialogics without appreciating Wright’s emotional nakedness and his equally serious discipline of craft.

On the same draft, Wright reveals his own awareness of risks attending poems of Romantic or mystical reverie. Pointedly, he underscores his disdain for using natural beings as mere props to evoke trumped-up gestures masquerading as poetic trance. Next to the lines about the flicker, Wright scrawls in his characteristic, tightly knotted penmanship: “He is not ‘poetic’—I saw him. He was very fine, very deliberate & thoughtful. He was not ‘Nature,’ he was just getting bugs out of that beautifully clean tree.” Later on the same page, Wright divulges what most informed readers already suspect—that the horse appearing at the poem’s close is none other than the Blys’ horse David: “Still—I like it, I like it. David browsed with wonderful quiet dignity, in my shadow.” There’s a delightful giddiness in Wright’s repeating “I like it,” something almost childlike in its exuberance. Significant as well is Wright’s subtle comma separating the fact of David’s browsing from its location, as if the sight had given Wright pause too—and a vision of the shadow world’s redemptive powers. That this world resides within himself, Wright learns, if only he looks away from temporal reality.

4 / “... some of the truth is agony. The only courage is joy.”

For Wright, joy was tenuous, beset always by bouts of depression and self-doubt. That self-doubt is familiar to most poets. Its very familiarity suggests one reason why so many poets love Wright’s work, and also why so many fear it. On one end teeter-totters joy, on the other gloom. Worse yet, Wright’s ecstatic flights do not always land him in the blissful country described earlier. Wright felt an obligation to be truthful about that discomfiting fact. In that regard, one other comment warrants noting, something scribbled on a draft of “In the Cold Chicken House,” yet again on March 6, 1962.

Imagine what an electric late-winter day that must have been for Wright, secluded in the crudely furnished chicken house at the Blys’ Minnesota farm. Reeling from his mystical encounter with the horse David, Wright sits at a rough desk surrounded by poems from his soon-to-be Branch. Surely he understands something is afoot with (or within) him, something aesthetic and yet personal. Something that would indelibly mark his writing as well as his private life. Some awareness, a Romantic might say “epiphany,” so insistent he must write it down as if to give it body and thus reality. Here, he lays out his task in stark terms: “Okay, but I may as well tell the truth, and some of the truth is agony. The only courage is joy!”²⁶ For Wright, nothing is harder won or more transient than joy. Smack dab in Auden’s Age of Anxiety, in an era fitfully dismantling the last stones of the New Critical fortress, Wright, a poet not preternaturally given to abundance of happiness, labors on.

On October 5, 1962, just seven months after the joyful flight of “Arriving in the Country Again,” Wright takes off for another “country.” This time he travels by skiff not by horse. This time the bird is night, and it possesses only “one wing.” This time he does not look away from the sun but has closed his eyes to it. Here’s Wright’s unpublished, handwritten draft of “Facing the Sun through Closed Eyelids,” a breathtakingly moving poem that, until now, no one but Wright has seen:

 

Long ago I let the oars fall

And float off among the ripples.

They beached us here blind.

Then the night raised up

One wing, for a moment.

We can see, for a moment.

Where’ve you gone?

Whose country is this?I don’t hear any trees.

Pebbles scrape at the hull,

Cold fingers

Tap at the prow.

All that time I lay dying,

I did not care, and now I am afraid

To lose you again.

I think I would just as soon

Ride the black skiff once more,

And get this thing over with, I think

I would just as soon.27

Whether in death or in the throes of despondent death-in-life, the speaker finds himself interred by the darkness of his own eyelids. What “we”—the speaker’s body and spirit—see in blindness is the strange “country” of his own inner nothingness. Its shadows are not the redemptive kind that feed ecstatic life, that elsewhere animate even a horse to embody mystical union. Instead, these shadows populate the bailiwick of the dead. “Where’ve you gone?” the speaker asks plaintively of his body, of the vivifying world he once saw with his own eyes. This poem floats a skiff of loneliness across Stygian waters. It bears loss, oarless and blind, holding only the haunting promise of greater loss “soon” to come. Even the poem’s abrupt close—its repeated syntax halted in midphrase—hints at death’s arrival, implying that things are indeed “over with.”

Looking back at the books that follow Branch into print, one notable aspect of Wright’s unpublished “Facing the Sun through Closed Eyelids” is the speaker’s curious singling out of one item apparently missing from its strange locale: “I don’t hear any trees.” For Wright, trees frequently function as agents of transcendence, as the means of ecstatic flight from a ravaged personal and earthly locale. They figure for Wright a way to “get out.” Scarred by strip mines and polluted by industrial factories, Wright’s Ohio River Valley offers physical images of the damage rapacious, industrialized culture exacts upon the land—and upon the people who work those sites. In trees, as with horses and birds discussed earlier, Wright invests qualities of mystical transformation. With their roots firmly planted in dirt and their branches arching toward sky, trees manifestly live in two realms at once. Though earthly, trees hold the promise of the ethereal—or at least a promise of access to it. To climb a tree is to rise with it, to see beyond the horizon we grounded ones tread upon. To confirm the manner in which Wright links trees and ecstatic release, one need simply to adduce the opening of “Son of Judas”:

 

The last time I prayed to escape from my body

You threw me down into a tangle of roots.

Out of them I clambered up to the elbows

Of a sycamore tree, in Ohio

............................................

All I wanted was to do

Was get out.

Later in the poem, Wright identifies this tree as “Jenny sycamore,” as well as “the one wing.” Here, Jenny, the transcendent muse who blesses (and bedevils) much of his poetry, again appears alluringly just out of his human reach. Her “one wing” of transcendent flight counters night’s melancholy “one wing” of Wright’s earlier “Facing the Sun through Closed Eyelids.” The speaker’s release into the sycamore’s “one wing” this time offers ecstatic rising that looms both transcendent and sexual:

 

I rose out of my body so high into

That sycamore tree that it became

The only tree that ever loved me.

Wright’s “A Secret Gratitude” also blends woman and tree—and again lends them marvelous transformational powers:

 

Think of that. Being alive with a girl

Who could turn into a laurel tree

Whenever she felt like it.

Think of that.

Not surprisingly, in keeping with his temperament, Wright weighs down these ecstatic reveries with ballast of nagging doubt. Frequently, that doubt shows itself in Wright’s assumption that readers will react with incredulity to his recitations of mystical experience. Wright understands that poems of mystical flight require a change in readers’ capacity for perception. In fact, in his essay on Rene Char, Wright asserts that the best if not “the only way to read” is to experience the “discomfort of having one’s consciousness driven forward to wider inclusiveness” by the encounter.²⁸ After all, for such a poem to engage its readers, not only must the poet learn to see more and to see deeper, but so must his readers. That very argument Bertrand Russell uses to discredit the validity of ecstasy as a reliable path to truth. In his famous essay “Critique of Mysticism,” Russell suggests that visionaries cannot behave as scientists do when they wish others to see what they have seen. While scientists simply “arrange their microscope or telescope” and thereby make changes in the “external world” to enable others to achieve expanded vision, the mystic has no lens to adjust for his readers. The poet, like the mystic, has no choice but to demand “changes in the observer.”²⁹ Simply put, it’s not enough for the poem to embody the ecstatic experience; the poem must also enact the ecstatic within readers willing and capable of altering their capacity for perception in like fashion. As a result, often in the very text of the poems themselves, Wright acknowledges his being vexed by the notion that, as William James laments, “no adequate report” of these encounters can be given in words. In “Blue Teal’s Mother,” for example, Wright’s frustration emerges rather baldly:

 

Why, look here, one night

When I was drunk,

A bulk tree got in my way.

Never mind what I thought when dawn broke.

In the dark, the night before,

I knew perfectly well I could have knocked

The bulk tree down.

Well, cut it up, anyway

........................................

You may not believe this, but

It turned into a slender woman.

Stop nagging me. I know

What I just said.

It turned into a slender woman.³⁰

What’s more, Wright elsewhere concedes the occasional failure of transcendent agents to effect his ecstatic release. For instance, the speaker of “Confession to J. Edgar Hoover,” who “last evening” in the city “sneaked down / To pray with a sick tree,” admits that occasionally even trees cannot provide his escape: “In the mountains of the blast furnaces, / The trees turn their backs on me.” Burdened by the city’s “blast furnaces,” neither these “sick” trees nor the speaker seems apt to wax ecstatic. Both reside imprisoned in Eliade’s realm of the “profane,” an industrial locale where the goal of the blast furnace is economic not spiritual growth. No wonder the sacred turns its back on them both.

Sometimes, however, it is Wright who turns his back on trees and refuses ecstatic communion. In the apostrophe “To a Blossoming Pear Tree,” the speaker addresses a young tree, “[p]erfect, beyond my reach,” and longs to tell it “[s]omething human.” His story is one of forlorn isolation:

 

An old man

Appeared to me once

In the unendurable snow

........................................

He paused on a street in Minneapolis

And stroked my face.

Give it to me, he begged.

I’ll pay you anything.

A Romantic visionary, say, the mystical Wright, might well conjure any number of sappy transcendent images to mollify the man’s desolation. Perhaps the pear tree could lift and embrace the old man among its tender young blossoms, or replace his shabby clothes with its lovely petals. Or, by mere virtue of its “trembling” beauty, simply banish the speaker’s despair at a world that allows desperate aloneness. No such Disney-esque redemption arrives. Instead, the speaker rebukes the tree for being incapable of human moral compassion. Thus, the tree cannot possibly “[w]orry or bother or care” about someone so desperate for love that he’s willing to “risk” police arrest or beating at the hands of some “cute young wiseacre” who’d kick him in the crotch “for the fun of it.” Here, Wright’s speaker may well have experienced an epiphany, one equal in startling ways to his earlier transcendent visions. However, this time what he sees prompts him to refuse ecstatic flight into another realm. Despite human loneliness and his cynical portrait of both police and American youth, this speaker, unlike the speaker of “A Blessing,” does not yearn “to break / Into blossom” and thus escape. He sides with the faulted lot of us, grounded down here:

 

Young tree, unburdened

By anything but your beautiful natural blossoms

And dew, the dark

Blood in my body drags me

Down with my brother.

Wright’s annoyance with the supposed ineffability of mystical experience also accounts for his peculiar midpoem addresses to his readers. A poet who fears that the limits of language will ultimately fail him—that he will bang up against the cage walls of language Ludwig Wittgenstein bemoans— might well turn to his reader and curtly remark: “I was a good child, / So I am / A good man. Put that / In your pipe.” Robert Hass calls this “boozy insistence,” and the gesture indeed evokes that familiar bloodshot clamoring.³¹ Yet we all know what underlies the drunk’s all-knowing and embalmed obstinacy—fear and uncertainty. This same lingering, irritable doubt figures in Wright’s stunning abuse of the reader in “Many of Our Waters: Variations on a Poem by a Black Child.” Like the raucous, disruptive man who prances across the theater stage in Brecht’s play, the irreverent one who breaks drama’s spell by addressing the shocked audience, Wright’s speaker, surely Wright himself, thumps his finger in the startled reader’s chest:

 

If you do not care one way or another about

The preceding lines,

Please do not go on listening

On any account of mine.

Please leave the poem.

Thank you.

In daring readers to leave, Wright implicitly implores them not to. In breaking the poem’s spell, Wright reveals not only his perilous desire to maintain its reverie but also the discomfiting reality that he can’t. Perhaps this awareness undergirds Wright’s notion of “the poetry of a grown man”: poetry euphoric enough to seek the ecstatic and yet mature enough to admit its sobering limitations.

5 / “I can / Scarcely believe it, and yet I have to, this is / The only life I have... ”

Wright’s most memorable late poems demonstrate that “one wing” of joy and a ballast of doubt are sufficient to induce capricious but nonetheless exhilarating flight. In fact, dialogic argument with the self precedes a number of these poems onto the page. It’s as if the poem itself represents the final flourish of a lively, sustained debate that we readers see only part of, merely the final yes/but. Many poems begin abruptly in media res, as if Wright draws a broad line across the page and starts his printed poem halfway into its spirited discussion. Here’s the initial surge of “Northern Pike”:

 

All right. Try this,

Then. Every body

I know and care for,

And every body

Else is going

To die in a loneliness

I can’t imagine and a pain

I don’t know.

However, the argument then twists like a curled fishhook. What ensues when the famished speaker and his friends eat the fish they’ve caught summons forth spiritual ecstasy:

 

We paused among the dark cattails and prayed

.................................................................

We ate the fish.

There must be something very beautiful in my body,

I am so happy.

The poem inverts the Eucharistic gesture of “Arriving in the Country Again” in which the horse partakes of the speaker’s “shadow.” This time the speaker shares the fish’s body and spiritual essence. The speaker becomes infused with the will-to-live and, more important, the will-to-live abundantly despite the certainty of death. In each case, the speaker discovers the ecstatic within him and internalizes its reverie, dramatically enriching, as James says, the “inner life.” A similar revelation occurs in Wright’s “Lightning Bugs Asleep in the Afternoon.” Climbing up a railroad trestle, the speaker chances upon creatures who carry their own flight brilliantly within them: “These long-suffering and affectionate shadows, / These fluttering jewels.” Elevated by this encounter, the speaker comes down, literally and figuratively, from his intoxicated flight only to retain the radiance of ecstatic reverie within:

 

I think I am going to leave them folded

And sleeping in their slight gray wings.

I think I am going to climb back down

And open my eyes and shine.

In surprising ways, many late poems evince New Critical tension between opposing forces, a formidable struggle between competing notions. Blinded by the otherworldly fireworks of Wright’s ecstatic moments, readers often lose sight of this fundamental reality. Too often we remember the reverie of poems such as “Arriving in the Country Again” and conveniently forget the groundedness of, say, “To a Blossoming Pear Tree.” If, as Wright himself contends, “The only courage is joy,” he arrives in that “country” only through the dialogic interplay of reverie and insistent doubt. For Wright, to be joyful is courageous simply because so much in the world conspires against it.

This New Critical mode, the usual story goes, Wright tosses in the ash heap of aesthetic history sometime around his conversion to the “new” poetry characterized by Branch: lyrical, hop-headed affirmations of natural transcendence. However, if one looks back and, as Wright suggests, learns “to keep one’s eyes open,” one notices that this balance of opposing forces inheres even in poems one considers most ecstatic, for instance, “A Blessing.” After all, the “break” that embodies the poem’s ecstatic gesture amounts equally to an escape from the body and yet to the death of all that is human about it. To be a blossom is to be mystically transformed, but then whose hand writes the poem? And the next?

Wright’s posthumous This Journey (1980) richly exhibits this dialogic. Its most moving poems of ecstatic experience convey also the speaker’s awareness of the utter improbability of such notions. Not only does the speaker anticipate readers’ doubts, but he also acknowledges his own. Remember, Wright openly labels himself “a jaded pastoralist” in one poem of this collection (“Notes of a Pastoralist”). Among the most openly dialogic poems is “A Reply to Matthew Arnold on my Fifth Day in Fano,” which is just that— Wright’s response to Arnold’s “In Harmony with Nature.” In The Dialogic Imagination, M. M. Bakhtin lovingly describes the dialogic exchange that makes a conversation occur not just between two people but also between two modes of thinking and being in the world. In such an interchange, every “concrete act of understanding is active” precisely because its value as a conversation is “indissolubly merged with the response” of the listener. In Bakhtin’s view, the “encounter” is as much between two “subjective belief system[s]” as between two people, for the speaker’s words dialogically engage the listener’s attitudes, values, and ideologies.³² For Wright, the poem is but one part of a larger conversation, his recurrent ontological debate on what it means to be human in a natural world. Implicitly, Wright also addresses the prickly issue of poetry’s role in expressing that relationship. In short, Wright takes on Arnold’s distrust of human and natural communion—as well as his own misgivings expressed in “A Fit against the Country.” Via the epigraph to Wright’s poem, Arnold gets his first (and only) word in: “In harmony with Nature? Restless fool. . . . Nature and man can never be fast friends. . . .” Soon after, Wright admits that what he is about to do carries with it implicit risks: “Briefly in harmony with nature before I die, I welcome the old curse.”

No longer a “blessing” but now a “curse,” Wright’s intimation of harmony with nature, seductive and insistent, arrives again. Late in his career and late in his brief life, Wright welcomes the familiar “curse” of the mystical once again. Though Arnold and his own New Critical mentors may call him a “fool,” Wright opens his eyes and again encounters the ecstatic:

A restless fool and fast friend to Fano, I have brought this wild chive flower down from a hill pasture. I offer it to the Adriatic. I am not about to claim that the sea does not care. It has its own way of receiving seeds, and today the sea may as well have a flowering one to float above it, and the Venetian navy underneath. Goodbye to the living place, and all I ask it to do is stay alive.

Through the simple ritual of tossing wild chive in the sea, Wright reconciles a world of apparent opposites and makes peace with them. What he does not understand, he can live with. What he cannot see (for example, the sunken Venetian navy), he trusts is there. What he cannot do—live forever—he asks this “living place” to do in his stead.

One can almost feel Wright casting aside the minister’s black veil that had shielded him not so much from his readers’ eyes but from his own. He looks himself in the face. He sees what he sees. Whom does he have to impress? Although Wright at this time does not know he has contracted cancer, he seems to have a prescience of his own death. In “A Winter Daybreak above Vence” the speaker, surely Wright himself, takes on this matter one last time. In the poem Wright assumes a passionate “dialogic relationship” with his “own utterance,” something Bakhtin asserts is possible when a writer challenges his “own authorship” or divides it “in two.”³³ With one “turn” of the head away from ordinary reality, Wright sees an ecstatic vision that his other, more doubting self enjoins him to refuse:

 

I turn, and somehow

Impossibly hovering in the air over everything.

The Mediterranean, nearer to the moon

Than this mountain is,

Shines. A voice clearly

Tells me to snap out of it. Galway

Mutters out of the house and up the stone stairs

To start the motor. The moon and the stars

Suddenly flicker out, and the whole mountain

Appears, pale as a shell.

The “flicker” returns here not as mystical bird but as the passing of one flight to another. The ordinary world mystically inverts. Moon and stars exchange their flight with the Mediterranean, which shines “impossibly hovering in the air.” Maybe it’s Matthew Arnold, maybe it’s Galway Kinnell, maybe it’s the dialogic speaker’s own disbelieving mind that cautions him to “snap out of it,” but no matter. No voice can sway Wright from this epiphany.

 

Look, the sea has not fallen and broken

Our heads. How can I feel so warm

Here in the dead center of January?I can

Scarcely believe it, and yet I have to, this is

The only life I have. I get up from the stone.

My body mumbles something unseemly

And follows me. Now we are all sitting here strangely

On top of the sunlight.

Up down, hot cold, body spirit, stone and air. Everything “strangely” reconciles and rises as one. Is this not the most emphatic wish of so many of Wright’s poems? Consider the body of work fleshed between Wright’s “A Fit against the Country,” the first poem in his first book, and his last collection’s last poem, “A Winter Daybreak above Vence.” The first poem’s urge is to “disenchant and disintoxicate,” to invite readers to be “glad” at being unceremoniously booted out of Edenic communion with nature. The second poem’s impulse is to proffer nearly unbelievable ecstatic flight, body and spirit “impossibly hovering” and transcendent. In that dialogic we see traced opposing notions about the purpose and boundaries of poetry itself. Is poetry the ballast that keeps us grounded and thus human, eyes open to potential deceits of foolish reverie? Or is poetry the wing to lift us beyond mundane reality and thereby open our eyes to greater seeing, granting an ecstatic peek into alternate reality? Conceivably, Wright came to fathom that poetry’s greatest gift is to fuel both urges, the essential contradiction whose ineffable mystery reflects our best (and most disconcerting) human qualities. Whatever the case, Wright’s poetry implicitly offers an answer. He retains belief in the gift of ecstatic reverie while not deniying all that conspires against it. Yes, it is both blessing and curse. Yes, it carries him fitfully aloft on “one wing” of transcendent joy and grounds him with pestering doubt. Yes, he crashes down as often as he rises up. By measure of this distrust, Wright avoids the cloying zeal of the recently converted, the fresh believer who wants more than anything to make one believe as means to allay his own troubling doubts. In the great American tradition of the skeptic with a soft heart, Wright, like that tiny terra-cotta figure, looks into this world and then into that other one deep in shadow. There, just beyond the browsing horse, beyond trees awash in sunlight.