So This Is What It Feels Like: Empathy in the Poetry of James Wright

James Wright (1927–80) was considered one of the major poets of his era, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, even though the intense emotion of his work could prove divisive. So This Is What It Feels Like, a new critical study by poet and critic Adam Scheffler, makes a renewed case for Wright's importance by examining how his empathy for other people gives meaning to his poems.

Raised in the poor factory town of Martins Ferry, Ohio, during the Great Depression, Wright often wrote about struggling working-class Ohioans, as well as about suffering and marginalized people in Appalachia and the Midwest. Moving chronologically through Wright's career, Scheffler reveals that the author's intense empathy for these people challenged his poetic imagination in ways that often altered the form of a poem midway through, sometimes forcing him to invent a new style that would capture the resilient humanity of his subjects. So This Is What It Feels Like provides a renewed appreciation for Wright's art and how it expands the social capabilities of lyric poetry.

"At a time when empathy itself has come into question, Adam Scheffler intervenes with a smart, perceptive, thorough, and wonderfully sympathetic account of James Wright's highly empathic poetry, its formal inventiveness and human reach, and its stunningly American music. So this is what it feels like to read a marvelous young critic rethinking the work of a major American poet." - Edward Hirsch, president, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

"Scheffler's writing is perspicacious, lucid, and original. I can think of few contemporary critics with his talent. What's most impressive is the way his clarity of expression is endorsed at every turn by genuine and deep care for the work at hand. Scheffler's grace of style derives from his formal talent as a prose writer, but also from true feeling." - Peter Campion, author of Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry