Hayden, Robert
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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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).

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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

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-- Hayden, Robert (Used by permission of the curator)