Editing James Wright (poet) (section)

==Life==
James Wright was born and spent his childhood in [[Martins Ferry, Ohio]]. His father worked in a glass factory, and his mother in a laundry. Neither parent had received more than an eighth grade education. Wright suffered a nervous breakdown in 1943, and he graduated a year late from high school, in 1946.<ref name="About James Wright">{{Citation|title=About James Wright|url=https://poets.org/poet/james-wright|language=en|access-date=2020-12-25}}</ref>

After graduating from high school, Wright enlisted in the U.S. Army and participated in the occupation of Japan. Following his discharge, he attended [[Kenyon College]] on the [[G.I. Bill|GI Bill]], studied with [[John Crowe Ransom]], and published poems in the [[The Kenyon Review|Kenyon Review]]. He graduated [[Phi Beta Kappa]] in 1952. That year, Wright married Liberty Kardules, another Martins Ferry native. Wright subsequently spent a  year in Vienna on a Fulbright Fellowship, returning to the U.S. where he obtained a master's and a Ph.D. at the University of Washington, studying with [[Theodore Roethke]] and [[Stanley Kunitz]].<ref>"A Poet of the Pure Clear Word", David Yezzi, Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2017</ref><ref name="About James Wright"/>
 
Wright first emerged on the literary scene in 1956 with ''The Green Wall'', a collection of formalist verse that was awarded the prestigious [[Yale Younger Poets Prize]]. By the early 1960s, increasingly influenced by the Spanish language surrealists, Wright had dropped fixed meters. His transformation achieved its maximum expression with the publication of the seminal ''The Branch Will Not Break'' (1963), which positioned Wright as curious counterpoint to the [[Beat Generation|Beats]] and [[New York School (art)|New York School]] and aligned him more with emergent Midwestern neo-surrealist and [[deep image]] poetics.

This transformation had not come by accident, as Wright had been working for years with his friend [[Robert Bly]], collaborating on the translation of world poets in the influential magazine ''The Fifties'' (later ''The Sixties''). Such influences fertilized Wright's unique perspective and helped put the Midwest back on the poetic map.

Wright had discovered a terse, imagistic, free verse of clarity, and power. During the next ten years Wright would go on to pen some of the most beloved and frequently anthologized masterpieces of the century, such as "A Blessing," "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," and "I Am a Sioux Indian Brave, He Said to Me in Minneapolis."

Wright's son [[Franz Wright]] was also a poet; Franz won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2004. Together, James and Franz are the only parent/child pair to have won a Pulitzer Prize in the same category.

Wright was a lifelong smoker, and was diagnosed in late 1979 with cancer of the tongue. He died a few months later in Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. His last book of new poems, ''This Journey'', was published posthumously by [[Random House]].<ref>{{Citation|title=An Ecstatic, Troubled Poet Comes to Life in a New Biography|newspaper=The New York Times|date=2017-11-22|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/books/review/jonathan-blunk-james-wright-poetry-biography.html|language=en|access-date=2020-12-25|last1=McHenry|first1=Eric}}</ref>