Charles Wright Biography

American poet, born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, educated at Davidson College in North Carolina and the University of Iowa. From 1957 to 1963 Wright served in United States Army intelligence in Verona and then studied at the University of Rome under a Fulbright Scholarship before returning to the USA to take up an academic appointment at the University of California at Irvine. In 1983 he became a Professor of English at the University of Virginia. His poetry, which is strongly influenced by the verse of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, has often been compared with that of contemporaries such as Mark Strand and W. S. Merwin, and is notable for its religiosity and its landscapes of the American South. Many of his individual poems, for example ‘Tattoos’ and ‘Skins’, take the form of extended sequences of a markedly autobiographical character in which the poet's memory fractures chronological time. His volumes of verse include Dream Animal (1968), Bloodlines (1973), Country Music: Selected Early Poems (1974), China Trace (1977), The Southern Cross (1981), The Other Side of the River (1984), Zone Journals (1988), and The World of Ten Thousand Things: Selected Poems, 1980–1990 (1990); Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews, 1977–1987 was published in 1988. He has also made translations from the Italian of Eugenio Montale in The Storm and Other Poems (1978). Wright won the American Book Award for poetry in 1983.