James A. Wright

"On December 13, 1927, James Arlington Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio."

"His father worked for fifty years at a glass factory, and his mother left school at fourteen to work in a laundry; neither attended school beyond the eighth grade.  While in high school in 1943, Wright suffered a nervous breakdown and missed a year of school.  When he graduated in 1946, a year late, he joined the army and was stationed in Japan during the American occupation.  He then attended Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill and studied under John Crowe Ransom.  He graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1952, then married another Martins Ferry native, Liberty Kardules.  The two traveled to Austria, where, on a Fulbright Fellowship, Wright studied the works of Theodor Storm and Georg Trakl at the University of Vienna.  He returned to the U.S. and earned Master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Washington, studying with Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz.  He went on to teach at the University of Minnesota, Macalester College, and New York City's Hunter College."

"The poverty and human suffering Wright witnessed as a child profoundly influenced his writing, and he used his poetry as a mode to discuss his political and social concerns.  He modeled his work after Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, whose engagement with profound human issues and emotions he admired.  The subjects of Wright's earlier books, The Green Wall (winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, 1957) and Saint Judas (1959), include men and women who have lost love or have been marginalized from society for such reasons as poverty and sexual orientation, and they invite the reader to step in and experience the pain of their isolation.  Wright possessed the ability to reinvent his writing style at will, moving easily from stage to stage.  His earlier work adheres to conventional systems of meter and stanza, while his later work exhibits more open, looser forms, as with The Branch Will Not Break (1963).  James Wright was elected a fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1971, and the following year his Collected Poems received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.  He died in New York City on March 25, 1980."  SOURCE: www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/james-wright

Wright's son, Franz Paul Wright, was also an award-winning poet.  Born in Vienna, Austria, on March 18, 1953, while his father was there on a Fulbright fellowship.  His best-know collection may be his Walking to Martha's Vineyard (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).  Franz Wright died of cancer in Waltham, MA, on May 14, 2015.  For more information on Franz Wright's life and works, see his Wikipedia entry.
My father, C. Frank Stallings, taught English at Martins Ferry High School in the early 1940s, and James Wright was a student in one of his classes. Here is what I consider to be his best poem. It is about high school football at his alma mater which produced among others professional athletes Lou ("the Toe") Groza, who played for the Cleveland Browns, and his older brother, Alex Groza, who played college basketball at the University of Kentucky.  The poem is titled "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," from The Branch Will Not Fall, Wesleyan University Press, 1959.

"In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
"All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
"Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies."

Below is his photo as a high school sophomore from the school's yearbook:

SOURCE: The Ferrian 1943, S-W sophomore class photos.