On the Intergradation of Richard Wright's Poetry and Black Aesthetics

Richard Wright, the American black writer, is renowed for his "protest novels" which have been long appreciatively criticised. However, Wright's poetry seems to have been neglected. This paper attempts to explore how his poetry and the black aesthetics have well intergraded with each other by analyzing his six representative poems. Firstly, Wright, in his poetry, sought to define "the double consciousness" as the core of black culure and project a black aesthetic charatistic in African American culture. Secondly, Wright's political inclination embodied in his poetry has highlighted the black aesthetic characteristics. Thirdly, he applied Blues to his poetry as an indispensable element to explore the black aesthetics in black poetry. Finally, Japanese Haiku is employed in his poetry as a brand-new element of the black aesthetics, which is a key access to his quest for the equality of discourse power and the construction of the unique balck culture.