Cash arrives at Middleford a scared and timid kid from the Appalachian Outback. But he closes his first year at the school a feisty and dedicated young poet ready to grow into his role as artist, ready to corral words to clarify his emotions into what matters: poetry. In this, the novel is a particular genre of the coming-of-age narrative, the Künstlerroman (German for artist-novel), in which a character, usually an adolescent, grows into the awareness of the importance of art and then makes a commitment to pursuing the life of an artist.

Analyzed from this perspective, In the Wild Light thus paints the quintessential portrait of a poet as a young man. When Cash arrives on the campus of Middleford Academy, he has no background in poetry and tells his academic adviser he has never been much of a poetry guy. However, under the mentorship of Dr. Atkins and by drawing on the life lessons he learned from his dying grandfather, Cash comes to embrace the power of poetry and begins to craft his own verse. Key to Cash’s emotional and psychological evolution into a poet is the extra assignment Dr.