Mr. Wright, whose father was a civil engineer, did not seem destined to a life of poetry. In high school, he devoured all the books of William Faulkner — his mother had once dated one of Faulkner’s brothers — and as a student at Davidson College in North Carolina, he tried to write fiction, only to discover that he was, as he later put it, the rare Southerner who couldn’t tell a story.

Image Charles Wright in 2014, when he was named poet laureate of the United States. His new book, “Oblivion Banjo,” collects five decades of his work. Credit... Andrew Shurtleff for The New York Times

As a young G.I. stationed in Italy in the late 1950s, he picked up the New Directions edition of Ezra Pound’s “Selected Poems,” just published. From then on, he recalled, “I was enveloped by the fog of poetry.” A degree at the Iowa Writers Workshop followed, along with a Fulbright fellowship in Italy. His first few books received respectful notices, but it wasn’t until the poem “Homage to Paul Cézanne,” included in his fifth collection, “Southern Cross” (1981), that he found his footing.

“That’s where I sort of got my life into it,” he said. “I got the kind of line I wanted to write, the kind of poem I wanted to write.”

That poem, inspired by discarded paper glimpsed in a field one night, depicts a landscape layered with mystical images that language can’t quite capture:

At night, in the fish-light of the moon, the dead wear our white shirts

To stay warm, and litter the fields.

We pick them up in the mornings, dewy pieces of paper and scraps of cloth.

Like us, they refract themselves. Like us,

They keep on saying the same thing, trying to get it right.

If “almost nothing ever happens” in a Charles Wright poem, as the poet David Baker once put it (admiringly), such moments of vision can contain the whole universe. “When you’re really going, everything you see feeds into your grinder,” Mr. Wright said. “You’re alive to everything around you.”

The Chinese poets of the Tang dynasty and the Italian modernist Eugenio Montale (whom he has translated) have been enduring influences, as has his education at Episcopal boarding schools. While he’s long since become a nonbeliever, he said, “I was left with the glowing shards of things which have continued to dazzle at me.”

If he’s the rare Southerner who can’t tell a story, he can tell a poetic joke, sometimes at the expense of his own mystical tendencies, as in “Ancient of Days,” from his latest collection, “Caribou,” published in March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux:

This is an old man’s poetry, written by someone who’s spent his life

Looking for one truth.

Sorry, pal, there isn’t one.