Charles Wright

Charles Wright (born August 25, 1935, Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, U.S.) is an American poet known for his lyricism and use of lush imagery in his poems about nature, life and death, and God. He served as U.S. poet laureate from 2014 to 2015.

Wright attended Davidson College (B.A., 1957) in North Carolina, where he studied history. From 1957 to 1961 he served in the United States Army Intelligence Corps in Verona, Italy. Traveling through Italy with Ezra Pound’s The Cantos as a kind of guidebook, Wright developed a strong attachment to the Italian landscape, which would later influence his poetry. He received a master’s degree from the University of Iowa in 1963 and then won a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Rome, where he stayed from 1963 to 1964. Because his early attempts to write fiction had proved unsuccessful, he began experimenting with lyric poetry. In 1966 he started teaching at the University of California, Irvine, where he continued to write poetry. In 1983 he moved to the University of Virginia, staying there until his retirement in 2010.

Selected poems from Wright’s first four collections, published between 1970 and 1977, were published as Country Music (1982), for which he won a National Book Award. In his poems Wright reflected on some of the most eternal of human concerns—time, truth, nature, and death—and balanced his unending search for transcendence with elements of the ordinary amid the ineffable. The compelling representation of place is a notable feature of his poetry. Particularly effective are his descriptions of the American South, especially the area around Charlottesville, Virginia, where the poet spent much of his life.

The Southern Cross (1981) features long poems of broad scope gathered in fragments, like a daily journal. Despite their autobiographical quality, the poems are not solely expressions of the poet’s inner life. Five poems titled “Self Portrait” typify Wright’s reticence and affirm the indeterminacy of the artist’s personality. Critics described Zone Journals (1988) as Wright’s homage to Pound. The collection reflects Pound’s use of images, rhythm, and literary allusions. “A Journal of the Year of the Ox,” the longest and most ambitious of the collection’s poems, attempts to connect a host of images and themes, including death, loss of memory, absence, and negation. The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Selected Poems, 1980–1990 (1990) demonstrates Wright’s experiments with autobiography and his reflections on the literature and history of numerous cultures.

Wright won the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the collection Chickamauga (1995), named for the site of a Civil War battle. In it Wright blended such diverse artistic influences as Chinese poet Li Bai, Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, jazz musician Miles Davis, and American poet Elizabeth Bishop with experiences from his own life. The simplicity of those poems recalls the graceful sparseness of Chinese poetry. For the collection Black Zodiac (1997) Wright won both a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize (1998). Critics praised Black Zodiac for its innovative mixture of meditations, fragments of narrative, humor, and literary and artistic allusions. His later collections include Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems (2012), Caribou (2014), and Oblivion Banjo: The Poetry of Charles Wright (2019).

Among Wright’s other poetry prizes were the Poetry Society of America Melville Cane Award and the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Academy of American Poets (both in 1976), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement (1993), the Griffin International Poetry Prize (2007), and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (2013). In addition, Wright was given the PEN Translation Prize for The Storm and Other Poems (1978), his translation of Italian Modernist Eugenio Montale’s collection of poems La bufera e altro. Wright also wrote two volumes of “improvisations and interviews,” Halflife (1988) and Quarter Notes (1995), both collections of reviews, essays, interviews, and other short pieces. In 2014–15 he served as poet laureate of the United States.