A collection of Wright's essays on the language of poetry

Regardless how you interpret the statistics, the divorce rate in the United States is staggering. But, what if the government could change this? Would families be better off if new public policies made it more difficult for couples to separate?

This book explores a movement that emerged over the past fifteen years, which aims to do just that. Guided by certain politicians and religious leaders who herald marriage as a solution to a range of longstanding social problems, a handful of state governments enacted "covenant marriage" laws, which require couples to choose between a conventional and a covenant marriage. While the familiar type of union requires little effort to enter and can be terminated by either party unilaterally, covenant marriage requires premarital counseling, an agreement bound by fault-based rules or lengthy waiting periods to exit, and a legal stipulation that divorce can be granted only after the couple has received counseling.

Drawing on interviews with over 700 couples-half of whom have chosen covenant unions-this book not only evaluates the viability of public policy in the intimate affairs of marriage, it also explores how growing public discourse is causing men and women to rethink the meaning of marriage.

Jim Wright is an unabashed optimist. Reading his speeches, it doesn’t take long to see that he believes in the fundamental values that shaped the American republic: opportunity and accessibility, individuality and a shared sense of community. He carried this idealism into his presidency of Dartmouth College and, indeed, throughout his career as teacher and historian. At heart, Jim Wright was always a teacher. His election to the presidency of Dartmouth College gave him the opportunity not only to lead the college he loved, but also to use the presidency as a bully pulpit to encourage his students to make a positive difference in the world. The speeches gathered in this collection, particularly the annual convocation and commencement addresses, illustrate that calling. It is in these addresses that he was the most intentional about his goals and his aspirations for Dartmouth, for the Dartmouth faculty, and ultimately for Dartmouth students.

Although some critics have identified two phases in the poetry of James Wright and have isolated particulars of his movement from traditional to more experimental forms, few have noted also the elements of constancy in the evolution of his poetry. In this first comprehensive scholarly introduction to Wright’s work, Stein traces the unified growth of Wright’s poetry, asserting that while stylistic changes are often more apparent than actual, Wright does undergo a continuing personal and aesthetic development throughout his career. Stein examines the entire body of Wright’s poetry, including such previously unpublished materials as the collection Amenities of Stone.

Stein locates Wright in the Emersonian tradition which sees struggle with language as a struggle with the self -- a locating and defining of the self within a world of natural facts. Language, then, becomes a means of self-definition, and to be frivolous or irresponsible with language becomes a negation of the self and the world it inhabits. For Wright, “the poetry of a grown man” issues from this understanding. Because Wright joins the act of language with the act of selfhood, it is not surprising that the mode and tenor of his work would alter as the self redefines its values and goals, its very identity. In fact, Stein divides Wright’s career into three interrelated stages of development: “containment,” in which he relies on traditional religious and rhetorical measures to distance himself from a world of experience; “vulnerability,” in which he enters the experiential world where the self is rewarded and equally threatened; and “integration,” in which he accepts and balances the necessary combination of beauty and horror inherent in being human within a natural world.

Stein shows that throughout his career Wright’s presiding concern is to discover a way of writing and a way of life that might overcome the effects of an individual’s separation from the human community, the natural world, and the spiritual presence in the universe. In Wright’s world, to do less is to betray one’s language -- and one’s self.