Acknowledgments; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Part One: Transcendentalists; 1. Henry David Thoreau and Confucian Ethics; 2. The Poetics of Subjectivity: Emerson, Zen, and Lacan; 3. Emerson, Whitman, and Zen Aesthetics; Part Two: Modernists; 4. W. B. Yeats's Poetics in the Noh Play; 5. Yone Noguchi, Ezra Pound, and Imagism; 6. Albert Camus's The Stranger and Richard Wright's The Outsider; 7. Richard Wright's Haiku and Modernist Poetics; 8. Jack Kerouac's Haiku, Beat Poetics, and On the Road; Part Three: African American Writers

9. The Western and Eastern Thoughts of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man10. Pagan Spain: Richard Wright's Discourse on Religion, Politics, and Culture; 11. Private Voice and Buddhist Enlightenment in Alice Walker's The Color Purple; 12. Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, and African Culture; 13. African American Haiku: Richard Wright, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel; Notes; Works Cited; Index