(born 1935). American poet Charles Wright published more than 20 books of poetry. He was known for his lyricism and use of lush imagery in his poems about nature, life and death, and God. His well-crafted poems won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1998. In 2014 Wright was named poet laureate of the United States.
Charles Wright was born on August 25, 1935, in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee. From 1953 to 1957 he studied history at Davidson College in North Carolina, where he received a bachelor’s degree in history in 1957. He received his master’s degree from the University of Iowa in 1963. From 1957 to 1961 Wright served in the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps in Verona, Italy. Traveling through Italy with modernist poet Ezra Pound’s Cantos as a kind of guidebook, Wright developed a strong attachment to the Italian landscape, which would later influence his poetry. As a Fulbright fellow, Wright studied at the University of Rome from 1963 to 1964. Early attempts at writing fiction proved unsuccessful, and Wright began experimenting with the lyric poem. Returning to the United States, he received a teaching position at the University of California, Irvine, in 1966, where he continued to write poetry. In 1983 he moved to the University of Virginia, where he stayed until his retirement in 2010.
Wright’s first four collections, published between 1970 and 1977, were gathered in selected form as Country Music (1982), for which he won an American Book Award. Wright reflected on some of the most profound of human concerns—time, truth, nature, and death—and balanced his unending search for transcendence with elements of the ordinary amid the indescribable. The compelling representation of place is a notable feature of Wright’s poetry. Particularly effective are descriptions of the South, especially the area around Charlottesville, Virginia, where the poet lived.
The Southern Cross (1981) featured long poems of broad scope gathered in fragments, like a daily journal. Despite their autobiographical quality, the poems were not solely expressions of the poet’s inner emotions. Five poems titled Self Portrait typify Wright’s reserve and affirm the indeterminacy of the artist’s personality. Critics described Zone Journals (1988) as Wright’s homage to Pound. The collection reflects Pound’s use of images, rhythm, and literary allusions. “A Journal of the Year of the Ox,” the longest and most ambitious of the collection’s poems, attempts to connect a host of images and themes, including death, loss of memory, absence, and negation. The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Selected Poems, 1980–1990 (1990) demonstrates Wright’s experiments with autobiography and his reflections on the literature and history of numerous cultures.
Wright won the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the collection Chickamauga (1995), named for the site of a American Civil War battle. In it, Wright blended such diverse artistic influences as Chinese poet Li Bai, Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, jazz musician Miles Davis, and American poet Elizabeth Bishop with experiences from his own life. The simplicity of poems from this collection recalls the graceful sparseness of Chinese poetry. For the collection Black Zodiac (1997) Wright won the National Book Critics Circle Award and, in 1998, a Pulitzer Prize. The prizewinning collection was praised for its innovative mixture of meditations, fragments of narrative, humor, and literary and artistic allusions.
Among Wright’s poetry prizes were the Poetry Society of America Melville Cane Award and the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Academy of American Poets (both in 1976), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement (1993), the Griffin International Poetry Prize (2007), and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (2013). In addition to awards for his poetry, Wright was awarded the PEN (“poets, playwrights, editors, essayists, and novelists”) Translation Prize for The Storm and Other Poems (1978), his translation of the poetry of Italian modernist Eugenio Montale. Wright also wrote Halflife (1988) and Quarter Notes (1995), which were collections of reviews, essays, interviews, and other short pieces.