For as long as I can remember I've been hearing the story: that James Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, had nearly given up writing early in his career. What saved him? An unexpected copy of a new magazine called The Fifties and the ensuing correspondence with its young poet-editor Robert Bly. The correspondence bloomed into a friendship, and Wright's best and most famous poems were written at Bly's farm in Madison, Minnesota. As I say, I've been hearing this for as long as I can remember. But without a biography or a volume of Wright's letters to confirm the story, it always remained in the realm of rumor.
So it is with great pleasure that VQR presents those famed letters—both Wright's and Bly's—for the first time ever. They are everything their legend has promised. Those looking for grand pronouncements and fist-pounding urgency will not be disappointed. But what strikes me about these letters is exactly what would soon emerge in Bly's Silence in the Snowy Fields and Wright's The Branch Will Not Break: the longing of that period, the shared yearning for a deeper, more direct poetry. These two men, still strangers, yet camerados, were feeling their way toward something bigger together. In this peak moment of Wright's crisis and Bly's righteous indignation, it is a blessing that they found each other. Their lives were changed—and so was American poetry.