James Wright is a totally original poet. (A separate question from being a good poet or bad.) He doesn't resemble any precursors within American poetry (Roethke?). He certainly bears little resemblance to any European or Latin American sources that I know of (Neruda? I don't think so). His poetry would seem unoriginal if you didn't know that he was the first one to write like that. So whenever I start to write a poem entitled "Reading James Wright's Poem about Reading a Bad Book of Poetry and Wondering What Book it Was, and Whether it Was Really Bad, Then Closing my Eyes and Smelling the Rotten Wood," I have to stop myself.