In James Wright's Collected Poems (1971), the reader comes across "Small Frogs Killed on the Highway," which begins:

Still,
I would leap too
Into the light
If I had the chance.

In To a Blossoming Pear Tree, " The Secret of Light" discloses Wright's calling:

Directly in front of my bench, perhaps thirty yards away from me, there is a startling woman. Her hair is as black as the inmost secret of light in a perfectly cut diamond, a perilous black, a secret light that must have been studied for many years before the anxious and disciplined craftsman could achieve the necessary balance between courage and skill to stroke the strange stone and take the one chance he would ever have to bring that secret to light.

That desire is fulfilled in This Journey when, in one of Wright's finest poems, he leans "down to rinse the dust" from his face, and the discovery comes:

I found the spider web there, whose hinges
Reeled heavily and crazily with the dust,
Whole mounds and cemeteries of it, sagging
And scattering shadows among shells and wings.
And then she stepped into the center of air
Slender and fastidious, the golden hair
Of daylight along her shoulders, she poised there,
While ruins crumbled on every side of her.
Free of the dust, as though a moment before
She had stepped inside the earth, to bathe herself.

I gazed, close to her, till at last she stepped
Away in her own good time.

Wright's metaphorical journey appeared as early as The Branch Will Not Break (1963), which began with "As I Step over a Puddle at the End of Winter, I Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor." Thinking of Po Chui's journey, Wright wonders, by analogy, about the progress of his own:

Where is Yuan Chen, the friend you loved?
Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
Of the Midwest? Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.
Did you find the city of isolated men beyond mountains?
Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope
For a thousand years?

This Journey follows the quest framework and Wright's ever-present sense of an entire book's unified construction. He begins with "Entering the Temple in Nimes," and the penultimate poem is "Leaving the Temple in Nimes." The book opens by announcing, "As long as this evening lasts, /1 am going to walk all through and around/ The Temple of Diana." In the book's final poem, "A Winter Daybreak above Vence," Wright concludes, "Now we are all sitting here strangely/ On top of the sunlight." But how does he take up comfortable residence atop the light? In "A Winter Daybreak above Vence," Wright visits Galway Kinnell in the south of France, climbs alone on a cold night to the top of a hill, and looks:

Miles between me and the town of St. -Jeannet,
The road lamps glow.
They are so cold, they might as well be dark.
Trucks and cars
Cough and drone down there between the golden
Coffins of greenhouses, the startled squawk
Of a rooster claws heavily across
A grove, and drowns.
The gumming snarl of some grouchy dog sounds,
And a man bitterly shifts his broken gears.

In these final volumes it is faces that draw Wright into the light. In "The Silent Angel," as he leaves Verona, Wright looks back and notices a man's face: "He smiled at me, a gesture of the utmost sweetness, such as a human face can rarely manage to shine with, even a beloved face that loves you in return." In To a Blossoming Pear Tree, the dark-haired woman is Wright's muse of faces: "I will never see her again. I hope she brings some other man's face to light, as somebody brought mine." By the end of the poem, Wright expresses the serenity and openness, of face and light, that characterize his final phase:

I am happy enough to sit in this park alone now. I turn my own face toward the river Adige. A little wind flutters off the water and brushes past me and returns.

After his dark nights, Wright follows the guiding spirits of the spider, the lizard, the turtle, and the cicada. His use of creature-guides follows the method of Roethke, who explained his own snails, birds, and worms this way:

If the dead can come to our aid in a quest for identity, so can the living—and I mean all living things, including the sub-human. This is not so much naive as a primitive attitude: animistic, maybe. Why not? Everything that lives is holy: I call upon these holy forms of life. One could even put this theologically: St. Thomas says, "God is above all things by the excellence of His nature; nevertheless, He is in all things as causing the being of all things."

In "The Turtle Overnight," the poet begins by watching a turtle in the rain at twilight, the book's favorite time of day:

All the legendary faces of broken old age disappeared from my mind, the thickened muscles under the chins, the nostrils brutal with hatred, the murdering eyes. He filled my mind with a sweet-tasting mountain rain, his youthfulness, his modesty as he washed himself all alone, his religious face.

I dwell on the turtle in such detail because it helps to clarify a changed conception of the end point to Wright's journey. As did Roethke, Wright quests after self-transformation and self-transcendence. But the earlier forms of Wright's quest pointed toward a violent, suicidal transformation. That intensity is typified by the seasonal ritual of "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," where "Their sons grow suicidally beautiful/ At the beginning of October, / And gallop terribly against each other's bodies." We think too of Charlie and others in Shall We Gather at the River, " skillful with suicide," and of Wright's remark in "A Christmas Greeting": "I'm afraid to die, / It hurts to die, although the lucky do." This stance creates the threat which ends Shall We Gather at the River. To Jenny, his Eurydice, who lies "Face down in the unbelievable silk of spring, / Muse of black sand," he calls out, "How can I live without you?/ Come up to me, love, / Out of the river, or I will/ Come down to you." Wright's quest for the light, initially, involves a self-annihilating, violent end, as in "Small Frogs Killed on the Highway." The price paid for the leap into the light becomes part of its attraction.

With Wright's last books the movement into the light becomes a slow and deliberate surrender to self-transcendence, gently passing beyond the former violence that sought purgation. In "To the Cicada" the wild, violent ecstasy of the Holy Rollers of his native Ohio, who "rage all afternoon," "Their voices heavy as blast furnace fumes, their brutal/ Jesus risen but dumb," yields to the quiet ecstasy of the cicada:

You, lightness,
How were you born in this place, this heavy stone
Plummeting into the stars?
And still you are here. One morning
I found you asleep on a locust root, and carefully
I breathed on your silver body speckled with brown
And held you a while in my palm
And let you sleep.
You, lightness, kindlier than my human body,
Yet somehow friendly to the music in my body,
I let you sleep, one of the gods who will rise
Without being screamed at.

Wright clearly belongs to the American tradition, from Bradstreet to Emerson to Frost to Roethke, that makes nature a symbol of spirit, what James Breslin terms "visionary pastoralism." But there is also an antisymbolic and skeptical streak in Wright's work. He would deny Emerson's assertion that to study nature and to know thyself have at last become one maxim. "To a Blossoming Pear Tree" articulates man's difference from nature with an acuity reminiscent of Frost. Wright also swerves from his teacher, Roethke, whose natural world depends on Emersonian correspondences. Wright embodies or presents his illuminations; he rarely attempts to explain them. His poems bring us into apocalyptic experiences rendered in images, not discourse. Roethke, on the other hand, tends to prolong the moment and explain it. Wright concentrates more on the sharply figured narration of the mystical experience. Like others before him, Wright finds the light a transcendent metaphor of a knowledge both within and beyond him, poetic because it marks the limits of language. When in his Confessions St. Augustine struggles to express his illumination of "the Light that never changes," he first describes it "as if the light of day were to grow brighter and brighter and flood all space." The simile doesn't suffice, for the Light is "altogether different from all such things." Unable to find the precise words to describe his experience, St. Augustine nevertheless concludes that he "who knoweth the truth knoweth that Light: and who knoweth it knoweth eternity. Love knoweth it." When Dante presumes to fix his gaze upon the eternal light of the Paradiso, he beholds "leaves within the unfathomed blaze/ Into one volume bound by love, the same/ That the universe holds scattered through its maze." Wright avoids commentary in order to fashion a poetic experience of that "altogether different" moment, not a unity to be named and known, but a gathering of life's differences bound by love. Writing on Hölderlin's "Homecoming," Heidegger offers an explanation for the limitations a poet may place upon himself when describing the mysterious: "But we never get to know a mystery by unveiling or analysing it; we only get to know it by carefully guarding the mystery as mystery," So while Wright intends and allows his experience to be cast in a religious mold, outright theophany does not occur. God's presence is implied or inferred, never directly stated in Wright's poetry. His "the heart of light," "impossibly hovering in the air over everything," and "black as the inmost secret of light," translates traditional, mystical illumination into his own uncertain natural theophany. Strategically, Wright maintains a secular vocabulary.

Wright's stance before this light expresses the discipline of waiting. In Alone with America, Richard Howard quotes' Wright on Thomas Hardy's Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd: " The hero is always surrounded by things that fill him with inexorable affection and with which, at last, he becomes miraculously identified." The lizard, turtle, and cicada embody the lesson: "We fail in the grace to stand still. We want devoutness: the grace to see." In St. Teresa's "Camino de Perfeccion," we read of the traveler who stops in sight of the goal, refreshed by her sheer proximity to the waters of the spring, her faculties stilled by love: "One feels a great bodily comfort, a great satisfaction of soul: such is the happiness of the soul in seeing herself close to the spring, that even without drinking of the waters she finds herself refreshed." Writing on Hölderlin, Heidegger says:

Homecoming is the return into the proximity of the source.... It withholds the most Joyous. It keeps it and stores it away for the Comers.... The poet comes home, in the act of coming into proximity with the source.... To write poetry means to exist in that joy, which preserves in words the mystery of proximity to the Most Joyous.... The holy does indeed appear. But the god remains far off.

How can we judge the value of Wright's poetry? My personal assessment is unequivocal: he will come to be recognized as a major American poet. What does such a judgment imply? T. S. Eliot, in "What is Minor Poetry?" offers a valuable distinction:

The difference between major and minor poets has nothing to do with whether they wrote long poems, or only short poems—though the very greatest poets, who are few in number, have all had something to say which could only be said in a long poem. The important difference is whether a knowledge of the whole, or at least a very large part, of a poet's work, makes one enjoy more, because it makes one understand better, any one of his poems. That implies a significant unity in his whole work.