When the Librarian of Congress, Dr. James Billington, announced last week that retired University of Virginia professor Charles Wright would succeed Natasha Trethewey as the U.S. Poet Laureate, he called attention to Wright’s “combination of literary elegance and genuine humility.” But the quiet, spiritually minded, explicitly apolitical Wright is also a sharp choice to serve as “the nation’s official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans,” perhaps as exemplified by his declaration of purpose as laureate: “I’ll probably stay here at h...