# Hayden, Robert

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Christopher Buck, Hayden, Robert, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> Hayden, Robert
> 
> Hayden, Robert
> Christopher Buck and Derik Smith
> Subject: North American Literatures Online Publication Date: Sep 2017
> DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.485
> 
> Keywords added; sections expanded; notes added.
> 
> Updated on 26 April 2019. The previous version of this content can be found here.
> 
> Summary and Keywords
> 
> Robert Hayden was made poet laureate of Senegal in 1966 and ten years later became
> America’s first black poet laureate. He was acclaimed as “People’s Poet” early in his ca­
> reer, but he was largely ignored by the American literary establishment until late in life.
> In his poetics of history and his nuanced representations of black life, Hayden’s art
> showed that the African American experience was quintessentially American, and that
> blackness was an essential aspect of relentlessly heterogeneous America. As he figured it
> in his late-in-life poem, “[American Journal],” national identity was best metaphorized in
> “bankers grey afro and dashiki long hair and jeans / hard hat yarmulka mini skirt.”
> Hayden’s archetypal efforts to demonstrate the kaleidoscopic quality of both black and
> American identity produced an art that transcended propagandistic categories of race
> and nation, and pathed the way for a large cadre of late 20th and early 21st century poets
> who, like Hayden, understand themselves to be simultaneously black and American, but
> ultimately human.
> 
> Keywords: Robert Hayden, poetry, poet laureate, Black Arts Movement, national identity, African American, Bicen­
> tennial, Baha’i
> 
> Life and Work
> Legally, Robert Earl Hayden was never born. He had no birth certificate to show that Asa
> and Ruth Sheffey (born Gladys Finn), who separated before his birth, were his natural
> parents. So it was that Asa Bundy Sheffey came into this world, on 4 August 1913, in Par­
> adise Valley, a ghetto on Detroit’s East Side. At eighteen months, the boy was given to
> next-door neighbors William and Sue Ellen Hayden, who reared and rechristened him.
> William “Pa” Hayden is immortalized in one of Robert’s most anthologized poems, “Those
> Winter Sundays.” He remained with who he thought were his adoptive parents until the
> 
> Page 1 of 16
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> age of twenty-seven. In 1953, Robert was shocked to discover that the Haydens had nev­
> er legally adopted him, contrary to their claim, and that he was really Asa Sheffey.
> 
> Paradise Valley was racially mixed but predominantly black, and poor. Like most of the
> neighborhood’s residents, young Robert suffered from both poverty and prejudice. Al­
> though he would come to appreciate the great cultural vibrancy of the Valley, he also un­
> derstood that life in one of Detroit’s poorest sections rendered him vulnerable in a variety
> of ways. Handicapped by congenitally impaired vision, Hayden was acutely nearsighted,
> and his eyeglasses were extraordinarily thick. Being “four-eyed” and unathletic predis­
> posed Hayden to reading and writing. Turning his myopia into an asset, introversion nur­
> tured him as a poet.
> 
> In his senior year of high school, Robert was placed in Northern High, an East Side, pre­
> dominantly white “sight-saving school,” where he graduated in 1930. At sixteen he dis­
> covered, entirely by accident, the Harlem Renaissance poets in Alain Locke’s anthology,
> The New Negro (1925). Hayden was instantly drawn to Countee Cullen, who declined to
> call himself a “Negro poet”—an example the young poet would later follow. Although the
> volume Songs at Eighteen was rejected by Harper Publishers, the poem “Africa”—
> Hayden’s first—appeared in a 1931 issue of Chicago’s Abbott’s Monthly, a popular ethnic
> magazine. Revealing the influence of the Harlem Renaissance in its twilight period,
> “Africa” echoed the primitivism of Cullen’s “Heritage.”
> 
> During the Depression era, Hayden attended Detroit City College (later Wayne State Uni­
> versity) from 1932 to 1936. His family being on welfare, he could not afford the sixty-five
> dollars for tuition. Fortunately, the State Rehabilitation Service awarded Hayden the tu­
> ition scholarship he so desperately needed. A Spanish major and honor student, Hayden
> ended up just one credit hour short of graduation when his resources finally ran out.
> 
> Professional experience began where education ended. His job as writer and researcher
> for the Detroit branch of the Federal Writers Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Admin­
> istration from 1936 to 1939 gave Hayden his first national exposure when “Autumnal”
> was anthologized in the FWP publication, American Stuff (1937).1 More significant was
> the local recognition he achieved at a Detroit United Auto Workers Union rally, when Hay­
> den read his eight-page mass chant, “These Are My People,” and was spontaneously pro­
> claimed “People’s Poet” of Detroit. Like a fair number of his early poems, “These Are My
> People” reflected Hayden’s Depression Era leftist leanings. Originally composed for the
> Negro Culture Exhibit sponsored by the local National Negro Congress, his mass chant
> was later performed by a “verse chorus” and dramatized by Chicago’s Negro Group The­
> ater. It was around this time when he first met Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hugh­
> es, who came to see his play, “Drums of Haiti,” performed; Hayden played a voodoo
> priest. Moonlighting by taking on extra writing jobs in 1938, Hayden wrote weekly radio
> scripts based on episodes in African American history for CKLW Radio in Windsor, On­
> tario. He was hired in 1939 as director of Negro Research for the Federal Historical
> Records Survey but was fired in 1940. Hayden also worked part-time as a staff writer for
> the Michigan Chronicle for a mere six dollars per week.
> 
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> 
> Although still one credit shy of a Bachelor of Arts degree (which Wayne State would grant
> in 1942), Hayden was provisionally accepted, in 1938, into the graduate program in Eng­
> lish at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There, he won the Summer Jules and Av­
> ery Hopwood Award for the eleven-poem Heart-Shape in the Dust. The title came from
> Elinor Wylie’s Hospes Comesque Coparis, published in 1940 by Falcon, a local press.2
> Heart-Shape in the Dust, written during Hayden’s left-wing, proletarian phase, has a pro­
> nouncedly populist style, providing social commentary on racism, lynching, and economic
> oppression. Although they bear the germ of the themes and style that Hayden would culti­
> vate throughout his mature career, he disdained his first book later in life. With charac­
> teristically harsh self-criticism, Hayden hoped that all extant copies would be destroyed,
> and he characterized these early poems as “prentice pieces.” Hayden’s disdain for Heart-
> Shape was likely rooted in what he perceived to be its aesthetic failures.
> 
> In June 1940, Hayden married Erma Inez Morris, who would be his companion for the re­
> mainder of his life. A music teacher and concert pianist, Erma worked as a public school
> teacher in Detroit, supporting his lifestyle as a struggling artist. Eventually, they decided
> that Hayden should go back to graduate school. Beyond her unflagging support of his
> dream of becoming a great poet, his marriage to Erma would result in another major in­
> fluence on his life and work. Soon after they moved to Ann Arbor in 1941, Erma em­
> braced the Baha’i Faith, a new world religion promoting racial harmony, religious recon­
> ciliation, and ideal international relations. Hayden, too, joined the Baha’is in 1943, while
> still a graduate student.
> 
> In 1942, the year his only daughter, Maia, was born, Hayden won another Summer Jules
> and Avery Hopwood Award, this time for his unpublished collection, The Black Spear
> (originally titled Heroic Bronze). Hayden had decided that one of his primary objectives
> was to “correct the distortions of Afro-American history.” After he read Stephen Vincent
> Benét’s poem John Brown’s Body (1928), Hayden’s wish was to “be the one who’d fulfill
> Benét’s prophecy” and become the poet who would one day sing of the “black spear.” The
> Black Spear was a self-conscious effort in his quest to create a noble race memory. Sever­
> al of Hayden’s poems were elegies for African American heroes.
> 
> Later, Hayden took to heart advice from W. H. Auden, who counselled him to eschew
> overtly political rhetoric. Wishing to move beyond overused racial themes, Hayden experi­
> mented with a symbolist and surrealist method as a vehicle for social critique. With My­
> ron O’Higgins, Hayden privately published The Lion and the Archer (1948), an impres­
> sionistic, melismatic product of his “baroque” phase, his poems heavily ornamented and
> symbol-laden.3
> 
> In 1944, Hayden earned his master’s degree from the University of Michigan. He stayed
> on as a teaching fellow until, in 1946, he was appointed assistant professor of English at
> Fisk University, a highly respected, historically black institution of higher learning that
> was an oasis in segregated Nashville, Tennessee. Up until the era of civil rights and Black
> Power, the American professorate was highly exclusionary and populated almost entirely
> by white men. For midcentury black artist-intellectuals like Hayden, academic employ­
> 
> Page 3 of 16
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> ment was only available at historically black colleges such as Fisk. Because Hayden had
> very few professional options in the American academy, he endured significant labor ex­
> ploitation, often teaching five courses per semester at Fisk, where he was misled into be­
> lieving that he would eventually be appointed writer-in-residence. Despite Fisk’s reneg­
> ing, Hayden taught there for over two decades. He was promoted to the rank of associate
> professor in 1954 and to full professor in 1967, all the while teaching a heavy course load
> that limited the time he could devote to his poetry.
> 
> In 1954, Hayden was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship in creative writing for an
> artistic sojourn throughout Mexico. The following year, Figure of Time (1955) appeared.4
> One poem, “The Prophet,” later published as “Bahá’u’lláh in the Garden of Ridwan,” is his
> purest and fullest testimony of faith. A Ballad of Remembrance, his second collection, was
> published in 1962.5 The first two sections are reminiscence poems, intermixed with char­
> acter portraits; the third section features his Mexico poems, followed by tributes to
> African American heroes. A perfectionist, Hayden would publish revisions of his earlier
> poems in later works. Reworked poems took on a life of their own; they evolved over the
> course of their literary life, however slight their revisions were. They matured along with
> the poet.
> 
> Then came the big break that would bring Hayden international acclaim: on April 7, 1966,
> A Ballad of Remembrance was awarded, by unanimous vote, the “Grand Prix de la
> Poesie” (Grand prize for poetry) at the pan-diaspora First World Festival of Negro Arts in
> Dakar, Senegal. The festival had over ten thousand people from thirty-seven nations in at­
> tendance, making this literary prize comparable to an Olympic gold medal. Hayden him­
> self was honored as poet laureate of Senegal. Immediately after, Senegal’s president
> Léopold Sédar Senghor personally presented Hayden with his award at a ceremony in
> New York City. The following year, Langston Hughes (one of the eight judges) asked Hay­
> den to autograph Selected Poems (1966).6 This was a great honor for Hayden, who deeply
> respected and admired Hughes’s artistic accomplishments.
> 
> This honor was followed by an episode that literary historians have often regarded as an
> extreme trial and dishonor for Hayden. On April 22, 1966 at Fisk University’s First Black
> Writers’ Conference (organized by John Oliver Killens, appointed Fisk’s writer-in-resi­
> dence by university administrators, instead of Hayden), Melvin Tolson used a conference
> panel on “The Role of the Black Writer” to publicly condemn Hayden for refusing to iden­
> tify himself as a black poet. Tolson, who was Hayden’s generational peer and who worked
> with a high-modernist aesthetic that was similar to Hayden’s, never produced the mili­
> tant, populist verse that is associated with the Black Arts Movement. But, responding to
> the cultural and political currents of the mid-1960s, Tolson appealed to revolutionary-
> minded conference attendees by ridiculing Hayden and his refusal of the “black poet” la­
> bel.
> 
> Although Hayden was shaken by this public confrontation, and by subsequent critiques of
> his political aesthetics by young leaders like Haki Madhabuti, of the Black Arts Move­
> ment, many of these same militant artists and critics valued Hayden’s work. As Stephen
> 
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> Henderson, a prominent theorist of the Black Arts aesthetic, put it: “The fact of the mat­
> ter is that the Black community does not intend to give up any of its beautiful singers,
> whether Countee Cullen or Melvin Tolson or Robert Hayden. We may quarrel with them
> sometimes, but ain’t never gonna say good-bye.” Indeed, just hours after his skirmish
> with Tolson at the Fisk Conference, Hayden gave a poetry reading that conference atten­
> dees honored with a spontaneous standing ovation.
> 
> Years earlier, in 1948, Hayden had issued a manifesto, published as an introductory
> leaflet for the Counterpoise Series, in which he disclaimed his role as an activist poet. He
> now believed there was really no such thing as black poetry or white poetry. There was
> only good poetry and soap opera. Rejecting the primacy of race consciousness and its
> sometimes-polarizing agenda came at some cost to Hayden’s popularity, even though he
> claimed he could have been the “blackest of blacks” had he wanted to. In his estimation,
> to be a “black artist” was to ghettoize “black art.” That genre was too typecast, “overspe­
> cialized.” Such poetry, generating “more heat than light,” sometimes entailed being anti-
> white—something that ran completely counter to Hayden’s Baha’i-inspired vision of racial
> harmony. Moreover, conceptions of a properly “black poetry” often involved the strict
> policing and limitation of identity and art—only certain themes and aesthetic modes were
> considered authentically black. Such restrictions were anathema to Hayden’s vision of the
> ideal poet, whose only aspiration was an artistic achievement that required freedom of
> expression. Nonetheless, a great deal of Hayden’s poetry treats racial themes. It explores
> African American history and folklore in a quest to reaffirm the black struggle as a part of
> the long human struggle toward potential freedom.
> 
> Hayden’s first publication by a commercial press, Selected Poems (1966), marked the be­
> ginning of his real career as a poet.7 It led to several academic posts: poet-in-residence at
> Indiana State University in 1967; Bingham Professor at the University of Louisville, and
> visiting poet at the University of Washington in 1969; visiting poet at the University of
> Connecticut in 1971; Dennison University in 1972; and Connecticut College in 1974. Just
> one year after being promoted to full professor at Fisk, Hayden resigned to assume an af­
> filiation with the University of Michigan, where he taught from 1969 until his death in
> 1980.
> 
> After his move to the University of Michigan, Hayden continued his exploration of
> America’s identity, often using symbolist technique. Words in the Mourning Time (1970)
> focused on the turbulent 1960s and the Vietnam War and included elegies for Malcolm X
> and Martin Luther King Jr.8 In 1970, Hayden was given the Russell Loines Award by the
> National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Night-Blooming Cereus (1972), a slender vol­
> ume of eight poems, was followed by Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems
> (1975).9,10 That same year, Hayden was elected a fellow of the Academy of American Po­
> ets, with a citation for “distinguished poetic achievement” and a $10,000 stipend.
> 
> Toward the end of his life Hayden was appointed “Consultant in Poetry” to the Library of
> Congress, a post whose later occupants were named “Poet Laureate Consultant in Poet­
> ry” of the United States. He won the appointment for 1976–1977, having declined an ear­
> 
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> lier invitation because, as a new hire, he could not get a leave of absence from the Uni­
> versity of Michigan. Sadly, his reappointment for 1977–1978 came at a time when his
> health was failing. Health concerns and other mounting pressures led to a nervous break­
> down in 1977.
> 
> Hayden’s tenure as America’s poet laureate coincided with America’s Bicentennial. In ef­
> fect, this made Hayden America’s Bicentennial poet laureate. As a voice of America on
> this historic occasion, Hayden published American Journal: Poems in 1978; it was nomi­
> nated for the National Book Award.11 His vision of America would also be his final revi­
> sion: dying of cancer, Hayden delivered an expanded version of American Journal: Poems
> (published in 1982) to his publisher in person.12
> 
> All this recognition was long overdue. Having spent most of career in relative obscurity,
> Hayden was bitter over the fact that it took some forty years of writing before he was fi­
> nally published by a major East Coast press, Liveright. In 1976, Brown University con­
> ferred on Hayden an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree, as did Fisk in 1978. In
> January 1980, Hayden was honored, together with a group of other distinguished poets,
> in a reception, “White House Salute to American Poetry,” hosted by President Jimmy
> Carter and the First Lady in the East Room of the Executive Mansion. A testimonial in
> honor of Hayden was held on February 24, 1980 at the University of Michigan. Too ill to
> attend, Hayden passed away the very next day in Ann Arbor. His acclaim was hard-won.
> 
> Craft and Creativity
> For Hayden, craftsmanship was essential—a marriage between matter and manner, as
> Gwendolyn Brooks once described it. With missionary zeal, Hayden experimented with
> forms and techniques in an effort to arrive at what he characterized as something distinc­
> tively individual, patterned, yet wild and free. This even included expanding the language
> itself, with such neologisms as soulscape, snowlight, lifesquawk, mimosa’s fancywork, and
> Absolute Otherwhere. The reader encounters such expressions as moonstruck trees, auro­
> ral dark, famine fields, jazzbo strutting of a mouse, totemic flowers, paleocrystic ice, ele­
> giac lace, glaucous poison jewels, and blazonry of farewell scarlet.
> 
> Hayden was also drawn to the vitality of black orality, and he often braided it into the eru­
> dite high-culture lexicon that guided his poetry. With roots deep in what he called Afro-
> American folk life, yet fully at home in the collegial language and culture associated with
> long academic study and training, Hayden used a mix of linguistic registers to express his
> paradoxically cleaved relation to the black folk matrix from which he emerged. In his ma­
> ture poetry, Hayden frequently curated fragments of vernacular language to capture
> black cultural energy in his poetry; but his careful curation of this language in the context
> of his erudite poetic lexicon also reflected the vexed cultural status of the black artist-in­
> tellectual conversant with two worlds—one suffused with traditions of orality and the oth­
> er highly literate.
> 
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> 
> Protean in his technique, Hayden employed a range of poetic and rhetorical devices to
> evoke each experience he sought to create. He was a virtuoso of rhythm, tonality, repeti­
> tion, irony, oxymoron, paradox, and symbolism. Using sense to intensify, Hayden primarily
> relied on visual and auditory images. His gift for visual imagery grew out of his handi­
> capped sight. Sensitivity to sound, tone, and cadence sprang from a keen sense of hear­
> ing, which Hayden developed to compensate for his poor vision. His work is full of dra­
> matic tension, edged by irony, and tempered by religious emotions as echoes of the hu­
> man spirit.
> 
> Themes and Theology
> Poetry, for Hayden, is the illumination of experience through language. Ideally, it can also
> serve as an agent of social change. He spoke of poetry (thus his own poetry) as combining
> the traditional roles of African griot (oral historian-balladeer), Irish bard (preserver of cul­
> ture), and Eskimo shaman (medicine man). As an American griot, Hayden kept alive the
> legends of great African American heroes, as in his tributes, “Frederick Douglass” (a qua­
> si-sonnet) and “El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X).” African heritage, slavery, and Civil
> War history anchor many of Hayden’s poems in the shared experience of the American
> past. His most anthologized black history poems are “Runagate Runagate” (an archaic
> form of runaway; the poem is about the Underground Railroad) and “Middle Passage.”
> 
> Arguably his greatest masterpiece, “Middle Passage” required considerable research on
> slavery, which Hayden did at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Collection in
> Harlem during the summer of 1941. Hayden’s method, which involved diving into the his­
> torical archive to bring to life a record of the past that had been marginalized and sup­
> pressed, has proven paradigmatic for many history-minded poets of the late 20th and ear­
> ly 21st centuries. Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey, Elizabeth Alexander, Kevin Young, and
> Douglas Kearney are only among the more notable of the many poets who have sought to
> continue a tradition of African American historical poetics that was largely shaped by
> Hayden’s seminal work in the 1940s. Embracing the innovations of modernist poetics,
> Hayden’s historical explorations would often use several voices in a single poem. They
> served as dramatis personae comparable to a collection of monologues. “Middle Passage”
> is a prime instance of this, for it dramatizes the Amistad mutiny of 1839 from the van­
> tages of several “voices” who, through eyewitness accounts, depositions, ship’s logs, and
> journal entries, recount the horrors and heroism of that experience. The speaker sings of
> the human heroism of the rebel leader Joseph Cinqué, while giving voice to slave traders,
> hymn chanters, and even the dead. Through this discordant chorus Hayden achieved an
> uncanny ethos that has an eerie, almost ethnographic authenticity. With epic effect, Hay­
> den universalized the black experience as the heritage of America itself.
> 
> As an American bard, Hayden sustained an interest in heroic and exotic people—out­
> siders, pariahs, losers—and in the local color of places, localities, and landscapes. Draw­
> ing from folklore integral to African American literary tradition, voodoo magic casts its
> mythic spell over such poems as “A Ballad of Remembrance,” “Incense of the Lucky Vir­
> 
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> gin,” “Witch Doctor” (inspired by Prophet Jones), and “O Daedalus, Fly Away Home.”
> “Electrical Storm” is suffused with folkloric elements.
> 
> Hayden’s deeper interest was in getting at the reality behind appearances. Reality in­
> cludes both the metaphysical and the physical, which he connected through symbolism.
> One of Hayden’s favorite symbols was the sunflower, which was used to illustrate Select­
> ed Poems. As the one flower he was likely to see growing up in Paradise Valley, the sun­
> flower was an American lotus, a thing of rare purity, symbolic of the inspiring will to life
> and beauty found in so many of the nation’s economic dead zones. For Hayden, the sun­
> flower symbolized vitality and hope in the midst of deprivation. Hayden thought of his po­
> ems, whether patent or arcane, as a way of coming to grips with inner and outer realities.
> Poetry was a spiritual act, a prayer for enlightenment.
> 
> The Patriot-Alien of “[American Journal]”
> Despite making the improbable ascent from the destitution of Detroit’s Paradise Valley to
> the cultural achievement of the American poet laureateship, Hayden could never feel fully
> at ease in his nation—or in his skin. He was beset by a self-described “sense of alienation
> nothing could alter.” Yet, he was not acquiescent in the face of the natal dissonance he
> felt; Hayden struggled mightily in what the speaker of one of his deathbed poems de­
> scribed as the “World I have loved / and loving hated.” American Journal, his final book of
> poems, brings together themes and aesthetics that he had developed for several decades.
> He advances his historical poetics in a number of important poems; he considers the com­
> plexities of the class mobility he achieved as a renowned artist; he documents his strug­
> gles in faith while also affirming his Baha’i beliefs; and he repeatedly returns to the fig­
> ure of the outsider, the alien whose liminality affords him a kind of second sight. Michael
> Harper, Hayden’s friend, publisher, and fellow-poet, described the volume as “an indica­
> tor of his [Hayden’s] new poetic resolve to speak freely about America’s conundrum, race
> and identity.”
> 
> Although the poem that gives title to the book is not often considered one of Hayden’s
> masterworks, it is perhaps the best reflection of his late-in-life relation to American iden­
> tity. In “[American Journal],” written on the occasion of the American Bicentennial, while
> he served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, Hayden conjured a poetic
> persona from another planet, literalizing the figure of the alien, to offer a wide-ranging
> assessment of the nation. Issued from the office of the Poet Laureate, the poem is in many
> ways a final testament of Hayden’s love for the culture, the style, and the vitality of his
> fellow Americans, “brash new comers lately sprung up in our galaxy.” And yet, it also a
> deeply felt critique of a nation that, as Hayden—quoting Claude McKay—once put it,
> “feeds me bread of bitterness.” By inhabiting an alien narrator who must report his find­
> ings to superiors, Hayden adopts a poetic vantage point that is in keeping with his experi­
> ence as perpetual outsider. But by creating a speaker whose mission requires him to
> strategically adopt the “varied pigmentations” of the Americans, “white black / red brown
> yellow,” Hayden attempts to eschew racial particularism, cloaking his Bicentennial report
> 
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> in the appearance of racial objectivity. The transracial narrator is drawn to the American
> landscape and to the language and determination of its people; but the materialism, the
> violence and the simplistic nationalism of the Americans frighten him. Although the per­
> ceptive alien is a cultural sleuth who takes pride in his capacities of anthropological as­
> sessment, Hayden’s speaker is finally baffled by the contradictions and the variety of
> America, “as much a problem in metaphysics as / it is a nation.”
> 
> In “[American Journal]” Hayden’s narrator is an advanced life-form, a being from a
> province of the universe that has “outgrown illusions cherished” by the Americans—illu­
> sions of racial, political, and class distinctions that lead to conflicts and persecutions. In
> some ways the poem suggests that the alien is of a civilization that has attained the ideals
> of American egalitarian democracy that are enshrined in the nation’s founding docu­
> ments, but that have never been achieved in social and political practice. In conjuring this
> fantasy narrator and, by extension, the imagined civilization from which he emerges, Hay­
> den posits hope and displays the radical imagination that is always required if social ad­
> vancement is to be realized. If there is an underlying thesis in the poem, it is that social
> maturity is coefficient with limitless human solidarity. Ultimately, then, “[American Jour­
> nal]” is at once utopian and realist, a reflection of Hayden’s belief in the efficacy of the
> American work-in-progress, despite the horrors of its history and its ongoing moral fail­
> ings. Grounded in the teachings of his Baha’i Faith, Hayden believed that “America
> [would] be an instrument for peace in the future,” and particularly during his laureate­
> ship, he aspired to be a national poet, singing the American nation as patriot-alien.
> 
> For all its pain and redemption, it was the psychic evolution of America and the world
> that most interested Hayden. America is as much a spiritual idea as it is a geographical
> and political entity, and American life served as a point of departure for Hayden into an
> awareness of the universal. In all of this, freedom was a dominant theme. Widely recog­
> nized as a premier craftsman of American poetry, Hayden illuminated the human condi­
> tion while writing from the deep wellsprings of the black experience. Artistically, what
> distinguished Hayden most was his fusing of history and symbol, of the natural and the
> spiritual, to achieve an “intensification of reality” that triggers flashes of social insight,
> with unity as a touchstone of truth.
> 
> Discussion of the Literature
> Critical appraisals of Robert Hayden’s poetry have largely fallen into two camps: laudato­
> ry admirations of the work’s apparent racial transcendence and technical achievement,
> and skeptical critiques of its apparent racial transcendence and sometimes baroque, high-
> culture aesthetic. In a 1949 article in the New York Times Book Review, Hayden’s vol­
> ume, The Lion and the Archer, was hailed as “the entering wedge in the ‘emancipation’ of
> Negro poetry in America,” mostly because of its experiments with symbolist and imagist
> literary modernism and its refusal of the so-called protest mode that was dominant in the
> social realism of African American literature of the era. Yet, in a review of the same book,
> a critic writing for Crisis magazine mocked Hayden’s penchant for erudite neologism and
> 
> Page 9 of 16
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> Hayden, Robert
> 
> seeming rejection of racial exigency; aping Hayden’s baroque style, the critic notes the
> book’s “dazzleclustered trees and jokes of nacre and ormolu” and accuses the poet of try­
> ing to separate himself from the mainstream of Negro poetics. The dichotomous respons­
> es to The Lion and the Archer of the 1940s established a critical paradigm that has been
> associated with Hayden’s work ever since.13
> 
> In Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry,
> Hayden’s effort to commit himself to art, rather than to black struggle, is celebrated as a
> primary aesthetic influence for university-based African American poets of the post-Civil
> Rights/Black Power era.14 However, in a trenchant critique of the anthology published in
> Poetry, Amiri Baraka derided Hayden and his literary descendants for producing esoteric
> poetry having “nothing to do with the real world and real people.”15 At the height of his
> career in the late 1960s and the 1970s, critical responses to Hayden oscillated between
> ideologically inflected poles, with many literary critics marveling at his synthesis of mod­
> ernist aesthetics and African American cultural material, and a few detractors chiding
> him for literary politics exemplified in his penchant for, what one critic called, “standard
> academic English with no black flavor.” However, even among the radical, militant black
> literary school of that era, Hayden’s art was respected—and his poems on African Ameri­
> can history were particularly praised.
> 
> From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robert Hayden, published by John
> Hatcher, the most comprehensive literary biography on the poet.16 Two other mono­
> graphs on Hayden—by Pontheolla Williams (1987) and Fred Fetrow (1984)—appeared in
> the 1980s.17 Hatcher’s work differs from that of Williams and Fetrow in that it uses
> Hayden’s religious commitment to the Bahá’í Faith as a primary lens through which to in­
> terpret the poetry. All three books abide by a narrative of literary history that makes
> much of Hayden’s conflict with the “Black Aesthetic” of the 1960s and 1970s, and with a
> few poets of that era.
> 
> Apart from a smattering of articles in the 1980s and 1990s, Hayden received surprisingly
> little critical attention in the decades following his death in 1980. The relative critical ne­
> glect was, on the one hand, a reflection of the paucity of scholarly analysis of African
> American poetry during that time, and on the other, a symptom of the period’s critical
> turn toward formal explorations of vernacular aesthetics and representations of orality in
> African American literature. Hayden’s “writerly” aesthetic did not readily lend itself to
> treatment in critical studies of “speakerly” texts, which flourished in the 1980s and
> 1990s. And, although Hayden’s reputation grew, as his influence became increasingly
> perceptible in the work of late 20th century black poets, his art was rarely addressed by
> field-shaping literary critics like Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker.
> 
> However, in 2001, the University of Michigan Press published a major collection of prose
> pieces on Hayden.18 Compiling original reviews, critical essays and some of Hayden’s
> prose and interviews, most of the work in the volume had been previously published; nev­
> ertheless, the publication of the compilation indicated that at the beginning of the 21st
> century Hayden was generating significant scholarly attention. Editorial work by Charles
> 
> Page 10 of 16
> 
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> 
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> Hayden, Robert
> 
> Rowell at Callaloo journal helped to ensure that Hayden was not too badly neglected; in­
> deed, Rowell was pivotal in advancing the profiles of poets who followed Hayden in their
> “aesthetic and ideational” choices. But Rowell and other important champions of
> Hayden’s work, like Phillip Richards, often extended the literary historical narrative that
> pit Hayden in an agonistic binary against advocates of the Black Arts Movement.
> 
> This critical trend was disrupted in 2001, when James Hall published a critical history of
> the 1960s—Mercy, Mercy Me: African American Culture and the American Sixties, which
> devoted a chapter to Hayden and argued that the poet’s work was a prime example of
> African American “anti-modernism.”19 Hall contended that Hayden, along with a host of
> 1960s black artists, was involved in a project that sought to critique and imagine alterna­
> tives to racist, materialist, and nationalist Western modernity. Viewing Hayden as part of
> a sizable, diverse cadre of African American cultural producers similarly involved in a fun­
> damental questioning of cultural, civic, and political tenets of 1960s America, Hall put
> pressure on what he called folkloric narratives surrounding black intellectual and cultural
> life of the decade. His work on Hayden, which recognized the poet’s 1960s achievement,
> without a partisan disparagement of the Black Arts aesthetic that Hayden rejected, was
> an important development in the scholarship.
> 
> Although a thorough critical analysis of Hayden did not appeared in the 1990s and early
> 2000s, his literary politics and aesthetics were deeply influential for a large cohort of aca­
> demically trained poets who rose to prominence in that period. Rowell made efforts to
> point up Hayden’s powerful legacy in the introductory material of the volume Angles of
> Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, which borrows its
> title from Hayden’s poem “Angle of Ascent.” In implicit agreement with Rowell, critics
> such as Phillip Richards (2006), Keith Leonard (2006), Edward Pavlic (2002), and Christo­
> pher Buck (2008) wrote chapter-length studies in which Hayden is featured as a major
> American poet of the middle decades of the 20th century.20
> 
> Derik Smith’s 2018 book, Robert Hayden in Verse: New Histories of African American po­
> etry and the Black Arts Era, advanced the effort to challenge folkloric representations of
> Hayden’s role in literary culture of the 1960s and 1970s.21 Noting Hayden’s inclusion
> within several important Black Arts era poetry anthologies, Smith argued that Hayden
> could be understood as a dissenting participant in the Black Arts movement. Smith con­
> tends that Hayden, like poets of the BAM, was deeply engaged with the materials of black
> folk culture and language, but that in his poetry Hayden always addressed that material
> from an “aesthetic distance,” which the poetic consciously cultivated. While poets of the
> BAM sought to disappear the distance between themselves and the black folk masses,
> Hayden was more interested in measuring and exploring the distance between his erudite
> poetic personae and the black folk world. Smith also argued that Hayden, like the BAM
> poets, was alienated from both Western secular philosophy and the Christian mythos of
> the Negro Church. In Smith’s account, this double alienation led Hayden toward his in­
> tense, but turbulent, commitment to the Baha’i Faith, which the scholar uses as a prism
> through which to interpret Hayden’s extensive poetics of history.
> 
> Page 11 of 16
> 
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> Press USA, 2019. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy
> and Legal Notice).
> 
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> Hayden, Robert
> 
> Links to Digital Materials
> Stamp Announcement 12-25: Twentieth-Century Poets. Commemorative postage
> stamps issued in April 2012, honoring ten American poets.
> 
> Robert Hayden: Essential American Poets. Archival recordings of the poet Robert
> Hayden, with an introduction to his life and work. Recorded 1968 and 1977, Library of
> Congress, Washington, DC.
> 
> Selected Works
> Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940)
> 
> The Lion and the Archer (1948)
> 
> Figure of Time: Poems (1955)
> 
> A Ballad of Remembrance (1962)
> 
> Selected Poems (1966)
> 
> Words in the Mourning Time (1970)
> 
> The Night-Blooming Cereus (1972)
> 
> Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems (1975)
> 
> American Journal (1978, 1982)
> 
> Collected Prose (1984)
> 
> Collected Poems (1985)
> 
> Further Reading
> Buck, Christopher. “Robert Hayden’s ‘[American Journal]’: A Multidimensional
> Analysis.” Online Journal of Bahá’i Studies 2 (2008): 1–37.
> 
> Extended literary analysis of “[American Journal],” which has been acclaimed as
> “America’s Bicentennial Poem.” Argues that Hayden’s “[American Journal]” implies this
> thesis: “Social maturity is coefficient with human solidarity.” As a kaleidoscopic tube of
> mirrors, “[American Journal]” implicitly describes social identities that render the Ameri­
> can experience decidedly multidimensional, in which Hayden treats American identity in
> nine dimensions: (a) landscape identity; (b) alien (individual) identity; (c) racial identity;
> (d) political identity; (e) class identity; (f) material identity; (g) religious identity; (h)
> American (national) identity; (i) human identity.
> 
> Page 12 of 16
> 
> PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University
> Press USA, 2019. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy
> and Legal Notice).
> 
> Subscriber: OUP-USA Mirror; date: 07 October 2019
> Hayden, Robert
> 
> Chrisman, Robert. “Robert Hayden: The Transition Years, 1946–1948.” In Robert Hayden:
> Essays on the Poetry. Edited by Laurence Goldstein and Robert Chrisman, 129–154. Ann
> Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
> 
> DeJong, Tim. “‘Nothing Human Is Foreign’: Polyphony and Recognition in the Poetry of
> Robert Hayden.” College Literature 43, no. 3 (2016): 481–508.
> 
> Argues that Hayden’s poems “often use polyphony in order to provoke recognition” such
> that, by “interweaving different voices through his poems,” Hayden “explores the possi­
> bility of commonalities between subjects with markedly differing perspectives, back­
> grounds, and privileges” that, “while neither resolving systemic injustice nor minimizing
> the immediate facts of inequality, allow for a basic ‘humanness’ to encounter difference”
> and so “open up a space within which paths to reconciliation might begin to be
> articulated” (p. 483).
> 
> Fetrow, Fred M. Robert Hayden. Boston: Twayne, 1984.
> 
> Foundational biography, with comprehensive chronology.
> 
> Goldstein, Laurence, and Robert Chrisman, eds. Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry.
> Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2001.
> 
> Anthologizes “the most original and useful of the fugitive book reviews and essays extant”
> together with some new scholarship on Hayden.
> 
> Hall, James C. “Robert Hayden and the Politics of Memory.” In Mercy, Mercy Me: African-
> American Culture and the American Sixties, 39–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
> 2001.
> 
> Harper, Michael, ed. Obsidian: Black Literature in Review 8, no. 1 (1982).
> 
> This special 210-page issue, guest-edited by Michael J. Harper (a close friend of
> Hayden’s), features thirty-two short articles (mostly personal reminiscences) and six po­
> ems in tribute, followed by “Robert Hayden: A Supplementary Biography,” which adds to
> the 18-page Hayden bibliography in Obsidian 7, no. 1 (1981): 109–127.
> 
> Hatcher, John. From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robert Hayden. Oxford:
> Ronald Books, 1984.
> 
> Biographical overview, followed by an in-depth treatment of Hayden’s legacy, privileging
> the Baha’i dimension of his work. Dismissive of prior scholarship for how much of it polar­
> izes Hayden’s dual perspectives as a poet and as a Baha’i, Hatcher argues that Hayden’s
> poetry “is empowered by his Baha’i perspective, not injured by it.”
> 
> Hayden, Robert, and Michael Harper. “Robert Hayden and Michael Harper: A Literary
> Friendship.” Callaloo 17, no. 4 (1994): 980–1016.
> 
> Page 13 of 16
> 
> PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University
> Press USA, 2019. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy
> and Legal Notice).
> 
> Subscriber: OUP-USA Mirror; date: 07 October 2019
> Hayden, Robert
> 
> Leonard, Keith D. “‘Our Souls’ Strict Meaning’: Robert Hayden’s Spiritual History.” In
> Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights, 156–197.
> Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.
> 
> Pavlić, Edward M. “Blues and the Abstract Truth: The Politics of Abandonment and Demo­
> cratic Vistas of Descent in Afro-Modernism.” In Crossroads Modernism: Descent and
> Emergence in African-American Literary Culture, 79–173. Minneapolis: University of Min­
> nesota Press, 2002.
> 
> Rampersad, Arnold. “Afterword.” In Collected Poems of Robert Hayden. Edited by Robert
> Hayden, 197–212. New York: Liveright, 2013.
> 
> Rashid, Frank Damian. “Robert Hayden’s Detroit Blues Elegies.” Callaloo 24, no. 1
> (2001): 200–226.
> 
> Richards, Phillip M. “Robert Hayden: The Poet as Cosmopolitan Historian.” In Black
> Heart: The Moral Life of Recent African American Letters, 171–182. New York: Peter
> Lang, 2006.
> 
> Smith, Derik. “Quarreling in the Movement: Robert Hayden’s Black Arts Era.” Callaloo
> 33, no. 2 (2010): 449–466.
> 
> Argues that Robert Hayden’s “universalism, his reverence for the Western Canon, his dis­
> avowal of all types of poetic propaganda—are precisely the elements of Hayden’s artistic
> comportment that make him an influential figure in American poetry today.”
> 
> Derik Smith, Robert Hayden in Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the
> Black Arts Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018).
> 
> An extensive analysis of the poetry that explicates the genealogies of the political-aesthet­
> ic debates in which Hayden was embroiled during the Black Arts era, and traces the lega­
> cies of those poetic debates into the twenty-first century. The book also charts the evolu­
> tion of Hayden’s poetics of history, linking that evolution to the poet’s commitment to the
> Baha’i Faith.
> 
> Williams, Pontheolla. Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry. Urbana: University
> of Illinois Press, 1987.
> 
> A sequenced literary analysis of Hayden’s work, preceded by a short biographical sketch
> that comes close to being an authorized biography, based on interviews with Hayden and
> privileged access to his personal files.
> 
> Notes:
> 
> (1.) Kenneth Rexroth et al., American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose & Verse by Members of
> the Federal Writers’ Project. With Sixteen Prints by the Federal Art Project (New York:
> Viking Press, 1937).
> 
> Page 14 of 16
> 
> PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University
> Press USA, 2019. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy
> and Legal Notice).
> 
> Subscriber: OUP-USA Mirror; date: 07 October 2019
> Hayden, Robert
> 
> (2.) Robert Hayden, Heart-Shape in the Dust (Detroit: Falcon Press, 1940).
> 
> (3.) Robert Hayden and Myron O’Higgins, The Lion and the Archer: Poems, Counterpoise
> Series 1 (Nashville: Counterpoise, 1948).
> 
> (4.) Robert Hayden, Figure of Time, Counterpoise Series 3 (Nashville: Hemphill Press,
> 1955).
> 
> (5.) Robert Hayden, A Ballad of Remembrance (London: Paul Breman, 1962).
> 
> (6.) Robert Hayden, Selected Poems (New York: October House, 1966).
> 
> (7.) Hayden, Selected Poems.
> 
> (8.) Robert Hayden, Words in the Mourning Time (New York: October House, 1970).
> 
> (9.) Robert Hayden, The Night-Blooming Cereus (London: Paul Breman, 1972).
> 
> (10.) Robert Hayden, Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems (London: Liveright,
> 1975).
> 
> (11.) Robert Hayden, American Journal: Poems (London: Liveright, 1978).
> 
> (12.) Hayden, American Journal: Poems.
> 
> (13.) Hayden, The Lion and the Archer.
> 
> (14.) Charles H. Rowell, ed., Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary
> African American Poetry (New York; Norton, 2013).
> 
> (15.) Amiri Baraka, “Review: Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary
> African American Poetry,” Poetry Magazine (May 2013).
> 
> (16.) John Hatcher, From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robert Hayden
> (Oxford: George Ronald, 1984). Biographical overview, followed by an in-depth treatment
> of Hayden’s legacy, privileging the Baha’i dimension of his work. Dismissive of prior
> scholarship for how much of it polarizes Hayden’s dual perspectives as a poet and as a
> Baha’i, Hatcher argues that Hayden’s poetry “is empowered by his Baha’i perspective,
> not injured by it.”
> 
> (17.) Pontheolla Williams, Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry (Urbana: Uni­
> versity of Illinois Press, 1987). A sequenced literary analysis of Hayden’s work, preceded
> by a short biographical sketch that comes close to being an authorized biography, based
> on interviews with Hayden and privileged access to his personal files. Fred M. Fetrow’s
> work, Robert Hayden (Boston: Twayne, 1984), is a foundational biography with compre­
> hensive chronology.
> 
> (18.) Laurence Goldstein and Robert Chrisman, eds., Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry
> (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).
> 
> Page 15 of 16
> 
> PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University
> Press USA, 2019. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy
> and Legal Notice).
> 
> Subscriber: OUP-USA Mirror; date: 07 October 2019
> Hayden, Robert
> 
> (19.) James C. Hall, “Robert Hayden and the Politics of Memory,” in Mercy, Mercy Me:
> African American Culture and the American Sixties (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univer­
> sity Press, 2001), 39–77.
> 
> (20.) Phillip M. Richards, “Robert Hayden: The Poet as Cosmopolitan Historian,” in Black
> Heart: The Moral Life of Recent African American Letters (New York: Peter Lang, 2006),
> 171–182; Keith D. Leonard, “‘Our Souls’ Strict Meaning’: Robert Hayden’s Spiritual Histo­
> ry,” in Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights
> (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 156–197; Edward M. Pavlić, “Blues
> and the Abstract Truth: The Politics of Abandonment and Democratic Vistas of Descent in
> Afro-Modernism,” in Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African Ameri­
> can Literary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 79–173; and
> Christopher Buck, “Robert Hayden’s ‘[American Journal]’: A Multidimensional Analysis,”
> Online Journal of Baha’i Studies 2 (2008): 1–37. Extended literary analysis of what has
> been acclaimed as “America’s Bicentennial Poem,” “[American Journal],” Buck argues
> that Hayden’s “[American Journal]” implies this thesis: “Social maturity is coefficient with
> human solidarity.” As a kaleidoscopic tube of mirrors, “[American Journal]” implicitly de­
> scribes social identities that render the American experience decidedly multidimensional,
> in which Hayden treats American identity in nine dimensions: (1) landscape identity; (2)
> alien (individual) identity; (3) racial identity; (4) political identity; (5) class identity; (6)
> material identity; (7) religious identity; (8) American (national) identity; and (9) human
> identity.
> 
> (21.) Derik Smith, Robert Hayden in Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and
> the Black Arts Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018).
> 
> Christopher Buck
> 
> Wilmette Institute
> 
> Derik Smith
> 
> Center for Institutional Investment Management, University of Albany
> 
> Page 16 of 16
> 
> PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University
> Press USA, 2019. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy
> and Legal Notice).
> 
> Subscriber: OUP-USA Mirror; date: 07 October 2019
>
> — *Hayden, Robert (Used by permission of the curator)*