A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright by James Wright

Author:James Wright [Wright, James]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2005-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

To Dr. Arnold Stein

St. Paul

April 8, 1964

Dear Arnold,

I am certain that I speak only with the restraint and gravity suitable to the occasion, when I tell you that your beautiful letter to me (dated 23 March) was incomparably the most important achievement I have ever made in my life as a man who loves the high literary art. I want somehow to assure you, Arnold, that I am fully aware of the honor which you’ve done me in inviting me to contribute a critical essay to the volume of studies on Roethke’s poetry. The more I ponder your determination to “honor Roethke not by testimonials of praise” but rather by our best and truest efforts to see his work “in the hard, Sophoclean light” exactly as the young Pound asked to be seen, I am astonished at the splendor and nobility of your conception. For implicit in a gesture which ignores even a moment’s possibility of flattery and promptly begins the essential labor of criticism—that true criticism which is so rare among men, and so instantly recognizable for its magnificent terror of confounding its tentatively outlined summaries of poems for the “secular sacrament” (in Mr. Ransom’s dark and oracular phrase) that is moving and serene at once, and at once the ending and the beginning of the word when it is comely of vesture and countenance and then suddenly awesome in the bluntness of its unarguable deathlessness—implicit in the quiet, grave gesture toward seeing Roethke’s poetry in the company of Landor and Donne and Ben Jonson is in itself, I do most reverently believe, the gesture which Roethke labored and fought for a lifetime to make. To cherish his work, his art, by demanding that it respond to our most severe and attentive questionings by revealing suddenly, as it were, the precious stones that vein it, and accordingly by daring it to sag or crumble or heave up geologic “flaws” or more crumbling sandstone and fool’s gold, is to love the art as the poet himself loved it. I believe that, as time passes, and as factions perish and seas move and all the rest that dies and dies forever is forgotten, some of Roethke’s poems will remain among all our priceless things. And it is only the true criticism, the honorable effort of our very best intellectual attention, that can clarify for us what there is of immortal and mountainously enduring in Roethke’s art. I think of those cranky, somehow haunting lines of Mr. Winters: “Few men will come to this: / The poet’s only bliss / Is in cold certitude, / Laurel, archaic …” Arnold, I’ve written a bit more than a mere grateful acceptance of your invitation would require, because I wanted to clarify for myself the deep meanings which I instantly sensed in your distinction between mere rote praise and the living praise of critical devotion; and I feel, even more deeply now than at the beginning of my letter, how very beautiful and noble your plan is.

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