Q. I wonder whether you'd mind also commenting on "Mantis," and the poem interpreting it [All, 1923-1958, pp. 73-80]. You seem to be concerned here with the sestina as the ideal expression of the "battle of diverse thoughts" or associations arising in the poetís mind upon his encounter with a mantis.
[Gunn notes that the poem has excited attention among British and American critics who have cited it and then stated that they have "been rendered speechless by the newness of what they quote." Gunn then cites the entire poem, but continues.]
[This excerpt from a memoir by Robert Bly recalls the occasion on which Wright composed "A Blessing." Bly had graduated from Harvard then attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, but he was not satisfied with the poetry he was writing in the 1950s – historical verse with a setting in factual documentaries. (An example appears in New Poets of England and America, first series, 1957.) At the time he lived on his family’s farm in Madison, Minnesota.]
In late 1960 John Frederick Nims accepted "A Blessing," under the title "The Blessing," for Poetry magazine. … Wright had, in the meantime, decided to revise [what Norman Friedman characterized in a 1966 Chicago Review essay as] his "nearly perfect" poem. The following us the revision that Wright sent to Poetry for Nims’s approval:
JUST OFF THE HIGHWAY TO ROCHESTER, MINNESOTA
Twilight bounds softly out on the grass.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me
"A Blessing" is perhaps James Wright's best known poem. It certainly embodies his greatest strength: the poet evoking nature as an inroad to the metaphysical or numinous. Wright is, in general and in this poem in particular, a poet of epiphany in the grand Yeatsian tradition.
The visual is not confined to Cane's prose vignettes. The text’s poems employ visual devices as well. The first section of Cane contains three poems that had been collected in the Modern Review as "Three Portraits." The first two poems, "Face" and "Portrait in Georgia," employ something like the Petrarchan conceit. They compare the elements of a woman's face to a variety of objects or states.
Jean Toomer paints his "Portrait in Georgia" in one continuous movement, beginning with his portrait’s hair and moving down her face toward the rest of her body. While each detail is true to a physical description, it also serves to unmask the central cultural conflict of the American South. He documents hair, eyes, lips, breath, and body, with each feature simultaneously revealing a cultural history stalled in division.
“The Sinister Figure”: James Weldon Johnson’s “The White Witch” (1922) and Jean Toomer’s “Portrait in Georgia” (1923)
Cane’s most dazzling moment of regeneration is enabled by another image of connection: the tongue. Like roots and curls of smoke, the tongue can be pictured as a winding line, and it is in this form that it becomes the center of "Her Lips Are Copper Wire," a poem which must be Cane's most stunning single piece. . . .
In "Her Lips Are Copper Wire," the narator as persona is more intimately involved with the culture and addresses it as an agent providing love and care. Earlier values now rejected, this poem is a companion piece to "Rhobert" and "Calling Jesus," and what is important to the speaker is what he sees. He concentrates on the mechanistic attributes of his object of affection: the gleam of yellow globes of which she whispers, the instant contact with the "power-house," and the flashy billboards.