Admired for depicting the little dramas lived by the lonely and alienated, poet James Arlington Wright probed the distances between people. A lyric romanticist in the tradition of Robert Frost and E. A. Robinson, Wright profited from classes with teachers John Crowe Ransom and Theodore Roethke. His literary output was phenomenal: seven poetry collections and seven volumes of translated verse, plus a prose anthology and seven posthumous volumes. The conversational ease of his voicing, fidelity to detail, and immediacy of subjects are evident in such titles as "A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard's Shack," "Confession to J. Edgar Hoover," and "At the Executed Murderer's Grave."
Wright was born into a family of Irish talkers and storytellers on December 13, 1927, in Martins Ferry, Ohio. His Midwestern working-class roots held firm through three decades of poetic portraits drawn from heartland realities. During the Depression, his father suffered layoffs from the Hazel-Atlas glass factory. Wright thrived on public speaking in grade school and began writing verse in high school. After being drafted into the United States Army during World War II, he wrote his mother to forward copies of Gerard Manley Hopkins' verse and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. After he was mustered out while serving in occupied Japan, he took advantage of the G. I. Bill and entered the only school that showed interest, Kenyon College.
