Giving Up: James Wright and the Misgivings of Ambition
by Anthony Fife I�d started four different James Wright essays, each quickly withering on the vine. And me with such high hopes! The first one began, �There are at least half a dozen discernible James Wrights. Among them are the young formalist, the translator, and the European prose poet.� This one would have been an essay of lists and would require me to pick apart the inextricable. After the better part of a page I gave up. Three aborted essays later, I typed, �James Wright spent roughly the first half of his life in a world open only to traditional verse, and the second half in a world that tried to destroy it.� Even now I like this sentence, bold and calling out for a soulful �Amen.� But this one, too, as I worked my way through the introduction and into the first body paragraph, proved a failure. From such declarative beginnings I found myself devolving into a boring and wholly unoriginal treatise on how the G.I. Bill changed everyt...