Abstract: Named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2014, Charles Wright (1935- ) is acclaimed as one of the most important American contemporary poets, and has attracted increasing attention from the critics during the recent years for his originality and individuality. His landscape poetry, especially those in Chickamauga, is presented with quite a number of painterly elements and techniques, which render his poetry more closely related to paintings, or more precisely, modern paintings. Wright's landscape poetry portrays nature with the help of images, color and lines in the way similiar to line drawings, aiming to achieve a visual effect of silence, loneliness and tranquil meditation, while such painterly techniques as the “Blank Space” help to formulate Wright's writing strategy of “highlighting existence via absence”, which can be further recognized as his writing principle of “less is more,” serving to maximize the artistic conception in his poetry. Meanwhile, Wright extends a vision of natural landscape through the “eye” of a painter, aiming to bring out an associative structure and layout in his poetry by means of landscape depiction, by which he presents his inner world and illustrates poetry's function as “a construction of mind.” With its distinctive imagistic narrative, Wright makes his poetry a landscape painting of the mind.

Key words: Charles Wright, Chickamauga, landscape poetry, painting, construction of mind