Product Description: “There is something about the very form and occasion of a letter—the possibility it offers, the chance to be as open and tentative and uncertain as one likes and also the chance to formulate certain ideas, very precisely—if one is lucky in one’s thoughts,” wrote James Wright, one of the great lyric poets of the last century, in a letter...read more

The life and work of a major American lyric poet described in his own words. This collection captures the exhilarating and moving correspondence between Wright and his many friends, beginning in 1946 in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, the hometown he would memorialize in verse, and ending in New York City, where he lived for the last fourteen years of his life. In letters to fellow poets Donald Hall, Theodore Roethke, Galway Kinnell, James Dickey, Mary Oliver, and Robert Bly, Wright explored subjects from his creative process to his struggles with depression and illness. Selected Letters is an epistolary chronicle of a significant part of the midcentury American poetry renaissance, as well as a biographical picture of a major American poet.--From publisher description.