The Branch Will Not Break: Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Program) - Softcover

Wright, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0819510181 ISBN 13: 9780819510181

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 1963

Synopsis

These new poems by the author of Saint Judas and The Green Wall embody a sharp break with his earlier work. Their impact is well described by the British critic Michael Hamburger: ""He has absorbed the work of modern Spanish and other continental poets and evolved a medium of his own. This medium dispenses with argument and rhetoric, and presents the pure substance of poetry, images which are 'the objective correlatives' of emotion and feeling. It is only in the new collection that Wright has found this wholly distinctive voice."" Mr. Wright is well known for his previous books and his contributions to virtually every literary journal of importance. His numerous honors include a Fullbright fellowship, a Kenyon Review fellowship, and many other prizes and awards.

About this title

Review:

"These poems are splendidly direct, magnificently simple; sometimes the phrasing is so elegantly obvious that the heart jumps at it...This is a book which ought to be read at least three times, and then maybe once a month for as long as one lives. The first three readings are essential, if the reader is going to get much from these poems; they seem to make so few demands, they look so obvious, they are so subtle."--Hal Smith, Epoch

"His is a world haunted by the past and apprehensive of the future. It is, symbolically, the world of contemporary experience."--Gene Baro, The New York Times Book Review

"I like the force here, the clarity and directness, the language bound intimately with idea and image; and the harshness, the precision, the sense of fitness and place for every syllable."--Harry Strickhausen, Poetry

About the Author:

JAMES WRIGHT was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, in 1927. He was well known for his translations of such Spanish poets as Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo and for his poems about the Midwest. He received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1972 for his Collected Poems. Other books of his published by Wesleyan are Saint Judas, Shall We Gather at the River, and Above the River: The Complete Poems (co published with Farrar, Straus and Giroux). James Wright died on March 26, 1980, at the age of 52.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 1963
• ISBN 10: 0819510181
• ISBN 13: 9780819510181
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 59