A Study Guide for James A. Wright's "A Blessing"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for James A. Wright's "A Blessing," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535816472

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6

A Blessing

James Wright

1963

Introduction

A Blessing, which was first published in James Wright’s third poetry collection, The Branch Will Not Break (1963), and again in his Collected Poems (1971), is one of the most popular and highly regarded poems of his free-verse period. Prior to the 1960s, Wright had largely written poems in traditional closed form, and The Branch Will Not Break marked a radical stylistic departure for him. Gone were the meter, end rhyme, and structured stanzas of his earlier poems, and in their place stood a deeper focus on image, intuition, and simplicity of language.

Like many other Wright poems from this period, A Blessing grew out of Wright’s friendship and association with poet-translator Robert Bly. Around the time that Wright’s second book, Saint Judas (1959), was published, he struck up a correspondence with Bly, who invited him out to his farm in Madison, Minnesota, where the two worked together on translating foreign poets and where Wright underwent a crucial rejuvenation of his creative spirit. Together, Wright and Bly played key roles in the development of the so-called deep-image school of poetry, which gained prominence throughout the 1960s and which reached its height of popularity in the early 1970s. Deep-image poets eschewed rational explanation and discourse in their poems, preferring instead to develop images that, rather than merely paint pretty pictures, would unleash hidden wells of emotion in readers and spark associations in their imagination. The last three lines of A Blessing constitute one of the most powerful and memorable deep images ever devised.

In A Blessing, the landscape of the Midwest reveals itself as a positive, embracing force in the form of two Indian ponies that Wright and a friend (Bly, perhaps?) encounter in a pasture. This near fusion with unbridled nature generates such joy in Wright’s heart that he experiences a spiritual