Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio- Poets.org

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Wright

Born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, on December 13, 1927, James Arlington Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and was elected a fellow of The Academy of American Poets...
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	FURTHER READING


		Poems for Autumn
		Not Merely Because of the Unknown That Was Stalking Toward Them [But the rocking chair] by Jenny Boully

		After Apple-Picking by Robert Frost

		Autumn by Amy Lowell

		Autumn by Richard Garcia

		Autumn by T. E. Hulme

		Autumn Evening by David Lehman

		Autumn Grasses by Margaret Gibson

		Autumn Movement by Carl Sandburg

		Fall by Edward Hirsch

		Home by Bruce Weigl

		Lament of the Middle Man by Jay Parini

		Late Autumn Wasp by James Hoch

		Leaves by Lloyd Schwartz

		Mnemosyne by Trumbull Stickney

		November Night by Adelaide Crapsey

		October by Robert Frost

		Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley

		Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins

		That time of year thou mayst in me behold (Sonnet 73) by William Shakespeare

		The Plain Sense of Things by Wallace Stevens

		The Widening Spell of the Leaves by Larry Levis

		The Wild Swans at Coole by W. B. Yeats

		To Autumn by William Blake

		To Autumn by John Keats, read by Stanley Plumly

		Under the Harvest Moon by Carl Sandburg

		When Autumn Came by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

		Poems about Beginning
		At the Very Beginning by Katie Peterson

		How to Read a Poem: Beginner's Manual by Pamela Spiro Wagner

		In the Beginning by Anne Pierson Wiese

		It Was The Beginning Of Joy And The End Of Pain by Gillian Conoley

		Or to Begin Again by Ann Lauterbach

		Poem Beginning with a Line by John Ashbery by Randall Mann

		The Rider by Naomi Shihab Nye

		You Begin by Margaret Atwood

		Poems About Sports
		A Boy Juggling a Soccer Ball by Christopher Merrill

		After Skate by Carol Muske-Dukes

		Baseball and Writing by Marianne Moore

		Casey at the Bat by Ernest Lawrence Thayer

		Days of Me by Stuart Dischell

		Fishing on the Susquehanna in July by Billy Collins

		Night Baseball by Michael Blumenthal

		Séance at Tennis by Dana Goodyear

		The First Olympic Ode [excerpt] by Pindar

		The Trouble Ball [excerpt] by Martín Espada

		To An Athlete Dying Young by A. E. Housman


		Related Prose
		Groundbreaking Book: The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright (1963)

		Poetry Landmark: James Wright's hometown of Martins Ferry, OH

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Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio	Buy the CD
by James Wright


In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes. All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home. Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for love. Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful At the beginning of October, And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

Audio Clip
March 20, 1964 Guggenhiem Museum From the Academy Audio Archive
From The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright, published by Wesleyan University Press. Copyright © 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963 James Wright. Used with permission.

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