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Article: The south in Richard Wright's haiku.(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Notes on Contemporary Literature
- Article date:
- March 1, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Notes on Contemporary Literature. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Richard Wright, a Mississippi-born, world-famous African-American novelist for Native Son, composed some four thousand haiku in the last and half years of his life in Paris. In his haiku, Wright uses his pen as a brush to paint his tender feelings of nature and human nature.
Technically, a haiku moment presents the occurrence of an event at present time. It emphasizes the spiritual fusion of human beings with nature. Because it is terse in pattern, concrete in expression, and present in time, haiku has a strong tendency to be "intuitive rather than intellectual or allusive" (Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams [ Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998]: 21). Wright's haiku ...