[3] Others associate Wright with the African-American poets Robert Hayden and Melvin B. Tolson, due to his complexity of theme and language, as well as his work's utilization and transformation of the Western literary heritage.
[7] Jazz music informs Wright's work and aesthetic in various ways,[8] in poems such as "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting", "Billie's Blues", and "Twenty-Two Tremblings of the Postulant".
[5] As a student at Rutgers, Wright lived in Harlem, where he met African-American writers associated with the Black Arts Movement (BAM), such as Larry Neal, LeRoi Jones, and Henry Dumas.
[14] Indeed, Wright's poem "Idiotic and Politic", from The Homecoming Singer, has been read as "a virtual declaration of independence from BAM," addressed directly to LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), the founder of the Black Arts Movement.
In this book, Wright "attempts to bridge past and present and meditates on feelings of exclusion from society or personal identity using geographical settings as backdrops for the autobiographical persona's spiritual, emotional, and intellectual growth.
[15] The poem suggests an ambiguous, questioning attitude towards traditional religion that is revealed in the congregants' Africanization of Christianity: "They have closed their night / with what certainty they could, / unwilling to change their freedom for a god.
[5][15] Darryl Pinckney has argued that Wright's earlier poetry is more closely aligned with "the rebellious mood of the Sixties", referring in particular to the poems "Death as History" and "A Plea for the Politic Man".
[16] However, in discussing Wright's first five volumes of poetry, from Death as History to The Double Invention of Komo, Gerald Barrax sees a thematic and technical unity, describing these books as "so remarkably unified and consistent in subject, theme, tone, and technique that they might all constitute a single work.
"[15] Indeed, Wright himself has suggested that his books up to Explications/Interpretations (excluding the disowned chapbook Death as History) constitute a unified, ordered series, "a dramatic process, with all its tensions and resolutions.