Legacies of Resistance: Emerson, Buddhism, and Richard Wright’s Pragmatist Poetics

Anita Patterson

doi:10.31261/rias.15606

Published: 2023-12-29

Vol. 16 No. 2 (2023)

Legacies of Resistance: Emerson, Buddhism, and Richard Wright’s Pragmatist Poetics

Anita Patterson

Website: https://www.bu.edu/english/profile/anita-patterson/

Section: VARIA

https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.15606

Abstract

Emerson’s affinity with Buddhism has been the source of much controversy, and his adaptation of the doctrine translated as Buddhist “indifference” has been construed as stifling resistance to social injustice. I will revisit this topic, explaining why Emerson figures so prominently in discussions of Buddhism by the philosopher D. T. Suzuki and the British scholar R. H. Blyth, in order to develop a context for analyzing modes of resistance in Richard Wright’s late haiku-inspired poetry. A central question raised in critical debates is whether or not Wright turns away in these poems from the social and political concerns of his earlier works. I will show that their significance and force as protest poetry is considerably stronger when regarded in light of Wright’s “tough-souled pragmatism” and an Emersonian pragmatist tradition elaborated by scholars such as Cornel West, James Albrecht, and Douglas Anderson, a tradition characterized by East-West intercultural exchange that includes John Dewey and Ralph Ellison. Contextualized and enriched by this tradition, the poem Wright selected out of the 4000 to open his collection, “I am nobody,” can be read as alluding to Ellison’s allusion to Emerson in Invisible Man, protesting what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would some years later memorably describe as “a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’” in his celebrated “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” I will conclude with a brief consideration of how Wright’s creative engagement with Buddhism in the work of T. S. Eliot illuminates Emerson’s vastly neglected contribution to the development of high modernism.

Keywords:

transpacific , pragmatism , haiku , Buddhism , Richard Wright , Ralph Waldo Emerson , modernism , African American literature , John Dewey , T. S. Eliot

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Patterson, A. (2023). Legacies of Resistance: Emerson, Buddhism, and Richard Wright’s Pragmatist Poetics. Review of International American Studies, 16(2), 159–176. https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.15606

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Anita Patterson

apatters@bu.edu
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2530-3628

Affiliation:

Boston University United States

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Anita Patterson is Professor of English at Boston University. She is the author of From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge University Press, 2008). She is currently researching how the widening popularity of Japonisme fostered an American literary tradition of transpacific exchange that extends from Emerson and T. S. Eliot up through the Black Chicago Renaissance and the haiku-inspired poetry of Richard Wright.

Vol. 16 No. 2 (2023)
Published: 2024-01-31

eISSN: 1991-2773

10.31261/RIAS

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University of Silesia Press

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Legacies of Resistance: Emerson, Buddhism, and Richard Wright’s Pragmatist Poetics

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