SOURCE: Hakutani, Yoshinobu. “Nature, Haiku, and ‘This Other World’.” In Richard Wright and Racial Discourse, pp. 261-91. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Hakutani chronicles Wright's interest in the haiku during his later years, contending that his experiments with this poetic form “poignantly express a desire to transcend social and racial differences and a need to find union and harmony with nature.”

1

In 1960, less than a year before his death, Wright selected, under the title This Other World: Projections in the Haiku Manner, 817 out of the about four thousand haiku he had composed since the summer of the previous year.¹ His motive for writing so many haiku in the final years of his life is not entirely known, but he told Margrit de Sablonière, his Dutch translator and friend: “During my illness I experimented with the Japanese form of poetry called haiku; I wrote...