Richard Wright's Unpublished Haiku: A World Elsewhere - African American writer

   A tolling church bell:
   A rat rears in the moon light
   And stares at the steeple. (Spring 3)

The poems in "Pathos," like those in "Absence," are concerned principally with loneliness:

   A slow autumn rain:
   The sad eyes of my mother
   Fill a lonely night. (Autumn 40)

Of the four drafts of This Other World, draft 2 (File 161) provides the greatest insight into Wright's composing process and intent, and offers the clearest evidence of his unique use of haiku. Wright works out moods, attitudes, and concepts that will inform his new world. At the same time that he borrows from the traditions of Japanese haiku and Zen to construct his world, he adapts those traditions to his own perspective and purpose. To be sure, Wright intends This Other World to be organized by specific concepts, not by the seasonal divisions of traditional Japanese haiku.

Draft 4--Typescript, File 163--is the draft that Wright submitted to William Targ for publication. This draft does not have a table of contents, although the one for working draft 3 fits it fairly well? In addition, draft 4 does not divide the poems into four separate seasons, as is characteristic of traditional Japanese haiku. More importantly, the haiku are subtly arranged in clusters around the key concepts, moods, and attitudes worked out in draft 2. For the most part, the clusters proceed accordingly: "Contrast," "Delicate," "Cryptic," "Relation, "Illusion," "Projection," "Sensation," "Agreement," "Religion," "F," "Q," "Pathos," "Timelessness,"(13) "Personification," "Time," "Absence," "Animal Humor," "Other World," and "Death."(14) As has been demonstrated previously, these are the concepts that give meaning and form to This Other World.

This Other World is not an anomaly or detour taken by Wright near the end of his career. Nor does it represent a new direction. If anything, This Other World is an old direction rediscovered and revisited. It is an attempt to reclaim early personal theories of creativity, which require the writer "to fuse and make articulate the experiences of men," to "create the myths and symbols that inspire a faith in life, to "wonder out of what materials can a human world be built" ("Blueprint" 43, 49). It is also an attempt to redevelop the brief, yet stylistically powerful, visions and to renew the love of nature evident in Black Boy and 12 Million Black Voices. In some ways, the works conventionally studied by Wright scholars--Uncle Tom's Children, Eight Men, Lawd Today, Native Son, The Outsider, and The Long Dream--represent unsuccessful attempts at building a new world. They fail because they are profoundly anti-Zen: they sacrifice intuition to the intellectual, philosophical, and moral; they do not perceive unity and achieve enlightenment among the paradoxical and disparate. In some of these works, the perspectives they foster suggest a Wright who at times stands "too close" to his works, resulting in "blurred vision." In others, the perspectives imply a Wright who stands "too far away," resulting in" neglect of important things" (Blueprint" 45).