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Saint Judas
His second book of poetry after "The Green Wall".
- GenresPoetry
56 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1959
66 people want to read
About the author
James Wright
469Ìýbooks103ÌýfollowersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
On December 13, 1927, James Arlington Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio. His father worked for fifty years at a glass factory, and his mother left school at fourteen to work in a laundry; neither attended school beyond the eighth grade. While in high school in 1943 Wright suffered a nervous breakdown and missed a year of school. When he graduated in 1946, a year late, he joined the army and was stationed in Japan during the American occupation. He then attended Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill, and studied under John Crowe Ransom. He graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1952, then married another Martins Ferry native, Liberty Kardules. The two traveled to Austria, where, on a Fulbright Fellowship, Wright studied the works of Theodor Storm and Georg Trakl at the University of Vienna. He returned to the U.S. and earned master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Washington, studying with Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz. He went on to teach at The University of Minnesota, Macalester College, and New York City's Hunter College.
On December 13, 1927, James Arlington Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio. His father worked for fifty years at a glass factory, and his mother left school at fourteen to work in a laundry; neither attended school beyond the eighth grade. While in high school in 1943 Wright suffered a nervous breakdown and missed a year of school. When he graduated in 1946, a year late, he joined the army and was stationed in Japan during the American occupation. He then attended Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill, and studied under John Crowe Ransom. He graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1952, then married another Martins Ferry native, Liberty Kardules. The two traveled to Austria, where, on a Fulbright Fellowship, Wright studied the works of Theodor Storm and Georg Trakl at the University of Vienna. He returned to the U.S. and earned master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Washington, studying with Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz. He went on to teach at The University of Minnesota, Macalester College, and New York City's Hunter College.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 20, 2019
It is not every poet who can master two distinct styles—one he inherited from his teachers and one he pioneered himself—and then fashion poems in each of those styles that are extraordinary personal utterances, deeply expressive of the central concerns of both the poet and the man. James Wright is such a poet, and Saint Judas is the book that best displays his mastery of the first of his two distinct styles.
In The Green Wall, his first collection, Wright demonstrated that he could sing an elegy with the richness of Ransom and craft a blank verse with the subtlety of Frost. In St. Judas he merges the two: the rhymed elegies are deeper, more indirect, and the once spare blank verse now moves with a more abundant music.
In spite of the superficial clarity of these poems, I was sometimes unable to identify their speakers with confidence, even when the tale itself was clear. Was it murderer or victim who spoke of mercy and terror? Was it mourner or ghost who moaned the grieving words? For Wright it matters little, for each pilgrim soul is of equal interest to him: it is “passion�--in the Christian theological sense—that is his subject. It is what they have passed through—not their guilt or innocence—which interests him. As Wright says (“At the Executed Murderer's Grave�), “I do not pity the dead. I pity the dying.�
There are many fine poems contained here, but I'll forbear from quoting at length. The collection works much better as a unified whole. Nevertheless, I can't help but include the title—and final—poem of this brief collection, for it most clearly shows us the traitor as hero, the damned as saint:
SAINT JUDAS
When I went out to kill myself, I caught
A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.
Running to spare his suffering, I forgot
My name, my number, how my day began,
How soldiers milled around the garden stone
And sang amusing songs; how all that day
Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone
Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.
Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,
Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope
Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:
Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,
The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,
I held the man for nothing in my arms.
August 6, 2010
I read a poem a day over several days, before writing -- a kind of lectio divina -- and the voice & rhythms infected me, even if many of the poems eluded me. There's a pained and sensitive attention to morality here, and the poems feel extremely complicated and mournful emotionally, which creates a nice dissonance -- kind of haunting -- with the traditional rhyme schemes and forms. My favorites use both end rhyme and enjambment, so the rhymes are more subtle but still so careful and deliberate.
"Saint Judas" is the title poem -- one of Wright's best, I think.
And this bit from "The Morality of Poetry":
"Before you let a single word escape,
Starve it in the darkness; lash it to the shape
Of tense wing skimming on the sea alone..."
"Saint Judas" is the title poem -- one of Wright's best, I think.
And this bit from "The Morality of Poetry":
"Before you let a single word escape,
Starve it in the darkness; lash it to the shape
Of tense wing skimming on the sea alone..."
January 3, 2017
James Wright was just over thirty when his second book, Saint Judas, was published. Unlike his later free verse poetry, he was writing mostly rhyme and meter at this time - and hadn't really found his voice yet. Except for "Paul" and "A Breath of Air", there is nothing memorable here; his personality is submerged in the overly mannered rhyme and meter. While poets like Yeats, Frost, Millay and Lord Byron used rhyme and meter like a paintbrush to reveal aspects of their character and the world around them, Wright just seems to be trying to stay within the lines of a paint-by-number. He would go on to write moderately better in free verse - about as fine as Robert Bly and perhaps better than John Berryman - and become a successfull poet, in a modest American way. But his dream of being a poet for the ages dies in Saint Judas, with a couple shooting stars.
January 3, 2021
Lovely formal poems, just before his break with the old school of midcentury rhyming verse. The last half of the book is very strong, grappling with suicide, old enemies, murder and the dark themes that might have forecast his own death.
November 6, 2024
Better to trust the moon
Blown in the soft bewilderment of stars;
The living lean on pain,
The hard stones of the earth are on our side.
Blown in the soft bewilderment of stars;
The living lean on pain,
The hard stones of the earth are on our side.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
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