As both an exile and witness to the poverty of his native Martins Ferry, Ohio, James Arlington Wright escaped the harsh fate of his parents and peers to become one of the leading poets of his generation. With deep affection for his hometown, Wright remained haunted throughout his career by the suffering of his townspeople, including his father, Dudley, who was an employee of the Hazel-Atlas Glass factory, and his mother, Jesse Lyons Wright, who worked as a laundress. Influenced initially by the narrative, iambic style and demotic subject matter of Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost before turning to free verse and the more spare, imagistic strategies of the European Modernists and classical Chinese poets, Wright created …
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Citation: deNiord, Chard. "James Wright". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 May 2010 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4809, accessed 31 October 2024.]
