Richard Wright Poetry

In 1959, Wright would go on and have a chance encounter with a poem aficionado, a South African national who loved the Japanese form of poetry haiku, and from there would begin investing himself in the art and soon long enough that it became a sort of an addiction for him that he wrote everywhere he went: in cafes, restrooms, in the streets everywhere. Wright, according to his editor, wrote over four thousand haikus in 18 months before his death. This article will analyze all of Richard Wright’s poems that survived.

Analysis of Poems by Richard Wright

At his literary heights, Richard Wright had found solace in poetry, an art which he saw as the ultimate platform to truly expressly express himself beyond just mere words. He wrote tenths of poems, which are notable – particularly his haiku collections towards the final years of his life.

Haiku

Haiku is a native Japanese poem form that is characteristically brief and terse. Although modern-day haiku has changed a lot, the traditional Japanese style usually follows 17 syllables split across three lines, unrhymed.

Five Haikus by Richard Wright

The poem ‘Five Haikus’ follows Richard Wright’s vague detailing of his experiences being an African American and living in the United States at a time when members of his race were being oppressed and treated unfairly by their white counterparts. 

In the first haiku, the narrator, who seems to represent Wright himself, admits to being a nobody, someone without dignity who has lost his identity to the all-powerful white forces which he refers to as the ‘autumn sun.’ And like how autumns desiccate and dry out vibrant leafy greens, the white authorities stifle him (and his people) so hard that he loses the very core of his values. 

Further down the poem through the second haiku, Wright talks about his determination to seize back his integrity and the stages and processes that he takes – including joining a communist community that included white liberals who are as interested and determined as he is in ending racial segregation and oppression. 

He imagines this to be a good course and implores his black compatriots to join in his quest alongside white minds in search of black freedom. By the end of the fifth haiku, Wright looks into the past down the years and is left regretting what he could have been, and the accomplishments that he could have had if only the world was a fair playing ground for his likes.

Between the World and Me by Richard Wright

‘Between the World and Me’ follows one of Richard Wright’s earliest attempts at poetry many years back before he found love with the Japanese haiku poem form. The poem was published in 1935, five years before ‘Native Son,’ and retells a grotesque, visually upsetting story about the brutal murder of a black man in the woods. 

The poem’s plot begins with the narrator, suggestively black, accidentally walking into a body lying lifeless in the bushes. With this poem, Weight hits his readers with a heap of figurative expressions as needed enough to lighten up the abomination that takes place in the scene that gets almost hidden. 

From the first stanza, personification quickly comes into play as Wright suggests that nature – ‘scaly oaks and elms’ – comes true in preserving the scene. As the narrator reads the physical evidence around him and makes sense of the surroundings of the scene, he concludes that the man, a black man it seems, had been an unfortunate victim of racial conflict and appears to have been mauled to death by a white monster. 

Further down the poem, the narrator tilts his imagination the more to create a clear, almost real, but mental picture of the actual event and in the moment – as if to say he was a direct witness of the incident. Wright makes this happen for the narrator by deploying a litany of imageries to bring this moment back to life and relived, while also not living out the brutality and barbarity of the event from the scene. 

The poem has served as an inspiration to many, one of which is black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote a book of the same name in 2015 addressed to his teenage son, addressing him about the history and struggles of the black race in America.

Richard Wright and Haiku

After having his first schooling on haiku from a South African teacher, Wright knew that in his mind he had found a new passion to channel his emotional energy as he was already accomplished with his book, left America, and now living in Paris with his wife and didn’t do much of novel writing anymore. 

Wright’s first real education on the art of haiku started with studying the works of R. B. Blyth, who was an artful creator of haikus. Wright mastered all four volumes of Blyth’s haiku work – including other notable works – and began working on his poems during the last twelve months of his life. 

Wright was prolific with his haiku creations and, as mentioned before wrote over 4000 of them – as per the account of his editor. Wright’s motivation and passion for haiku were tied to a new sort of meaning and inner peace in life that he found. The author was especially devastated during this period by a lot of things, including his health struggle, and rejection by Americans, but worst of all for him at the time was the pain he felt from losing his mother. He found haiku indulgence as a solace for his emotional health crisis and would take advantage of any given moment to write them, whether he was in the toilet, bedroom or the streets, it didn’t matter the place because it was the one true thing that lit up his spirit. 

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