Hayden, Robert (1913–1980), poet. Robert Hayden looms as one of the most technically gifted and conceptually expansive poets in American and African American letters. Attending to the specificities of race and culture, Hayden's poetry takes up the sobering concerns of African American social and political plight; yet his poetry posits race as a means through which one contemplates the expansive possibilities of language, and the transformational power of art. An award-winning poet of voice, symbol, and lyricism, Hayden's poetry celebrates human essence.

Born to a struggling couple, Ruth and Asa Sheffey (they separated soon after his birth), Hayden was taken in by a foster family, Sue Ellen Westerfield and William Hayden, and grew up in a Detroit ghetto nicknamed “Paradise Valley.” The Haydens’ perpetually contentious marriage, coupled with Ruth Sheffey's competition for young Hayden's affections, made for a traumatic childhood. Witnessing fights and suffering beatings, Hayden lived in a house fraught with “chronic angers” whose effects would stay with the poet throughout his adulthood. His childhood traumas resulted in debilitating bouts of depression which he later called “my dark nights of the soul.” Because he was nearsighted and slight of stature, he was often ostracized by his peer group. As a response both to his household and peers, Hayden read voraciously, developing both ear and eye for transformative qualities in literature. He attended Detroit City College (Wayne State University), and left in 1936 to work for the Federal Writers’ Project, where he researched black history and folk culture. As this work proved enriching for Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and many other black writers, Hayden's research provided him with essential material and reading skills that would fuel much of his artistry. So too, his work in the theater at Detroit City College and later at the University of Michigan helped to develop his sense of dramatic voicing, evident in the polyvocality of “Middle Passage,” one of his best-known works.

After leaving the Federal Writers’ Project in 1938, marrying Erma Morris in 1940, and publishing his first volume, Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), Hayden enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1941. In pursuit of a master's degree, Hayden studied under W. H. Auden, who directed Hayden's attention to issues of poetic form, technique, and artistic discipline. After finishing his degree in 1942, then teaching several years at Michigan, Hayden went to Fisk University in 1946, where he remained for twenty-three years, returning to Michigan in 1969 to complete his teaching career.

Hayden's poetry reflects dramatic growth from imitation to a fully realized and independent artistic vision. Heart-Shape in the Dust, largely apprenticeship work, takes many of its cues from Harlem Renaissance poetry, particularly that of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Though largely derivative in concept and style, its attention to social criticism and its use of racially and culturally specific materials would mark much of Hayden's ensuing work. In 1942 Hayden assembled a second collection (it remains unpublished as such, but many of the poems appear in Selected Poems, 1966), “The Black Spear,” using much of the material unearthed during his work for the Federal Writers’ Project. Responding to Stephen Vincent Benét's invitation in John Brown's Body (1928) for a black writer to pen the seminal “black epic,” Hayden explores the complexities of an African American presence in American history. Revealing Hayden's technical development, the collection effectively uses dramatic voices, juxtaposition, irony, and montage for heightened poetic effect.

Hayden's third collection, The Lion and the Archer (1948), launches the career of a mature, self-possessed artist. The Lion and the Archer, Figures of Time: Poems (1955), A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), Selected Poems (1966), Words in the Mourning Time (1970), Night-Blooming Cereus (1972), Angle of Ascent (1975), American Journal (1978 and 1982), and Collected Poems (1985) establish Hayden as a major influence in American poetry, effectively bridging modernist and postmodernist eras.

An artist passionately committed to the discipline and craft of poetry, Hayden's symbolic density emerges from his manipulation of technical detail. Much of his poetry is highly economical, relying upon compression, understatement, juxtaposition, and montage, which often create highly textured and nuanced irony. Poems such as “Snow”, “Approximations”, “The Diver”, “The Night-Blooming Cereus”, and “For a Young Artist” demonstrate the pressure Hayden applies to specific words or concise phrases in order to release a range of suggestions and symbolic possibilities.

Hayden's command of technique makes possible his innovations both within and against the symbolist tradition. Hayden's thematic movement from racial or experiential specificity to fundamental commonalities relies heavily upon a symbolic system. The sordid and oppressive nature of black political life (often represented through the slave trade or the Vietnam War) finds synthesis and resolution in the symbolic realm. Thus Cinquez in “Middle Passage,” or the cereus in “Night-Blooming Cereus,” or Bahauallah in “Words in the Mourning Time” offer spiritual emancipation and renewal in a realm over and above the physical and limited. Here Hayden's faith as a Baha’i is central as it reinforced his belief in “transcendent humanity,” a spiritual or psychic unity of mankind capable of overcoming divisiveness.

Michael S. Harper refers to Hayden's poetry as “a real testament to craft, to vision, to complexity and historical consciousness, and to love and transcendence.” Readers find Hayden's poetry sustaining and compelling largely because of its struggle with epistemology and language; its celebration of African American oral tradition; its engagement of history; and finally its aesthetics and form. With emotional intensity achieved through technical mastery, Hayden's poetry renders a world fraught with anguish, yet one gesturing toward liberating possibility.

Bibliography

• Michael S. Harper, “Remembering Robert Hayden,” Michigan Quarterly Review 21 (Winter 1982): 182–186.
• Fred M. Fetrow, Robert Hayden, 1984.
• Pontheolla T. Williams, Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry, 1987.
• Norma R. Jones, “Robert Hayden,” in DLB, vol. 76, Afro-American Writers, 1940–1955, eds. Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, 1988, pp. 75–88.
• Xavier Nicholas, ed., “Robert Hayden and Michael S. Harper: A Literary Friendship,” Callaloo 17 (1994): 975–1016

Mark A. Sanders

Through his meticulously crafted and highly thoughtful poetry, Robert Hayden (1913-1980) often explored human dilemmas in the context of race. He was a college professor throughout his career, doing most of his work at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Hayden won the Grand Prix de la Poésie at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. In 1976 he was appointed consultant to the Library of Congress, becoming the first African American poet to receive this honor.

Robert Earl Hayden was born on August 4, 1913, in Detroit, Michigan, to Ruth Finn and Asa Sheffey. His parents had divorced by the time of their son's birth. Originally named Asa Bundy Sheffey, he was raised by foster parents, William and Sue Hayden. Robert Hayden (as he was now called) occasionally visited each of his biological parents while he was growing up. His mother lived nearby and, at times, with the Haydens. Although she was not well educated, Ruth Sheffey supported her son's ambitions. She was a vivacious woman, in contrast to her son's foster family. William Hayden, a laborer, was a strict Baptist fundamentalist. Sue Hayden was less austere in manner and outlook than her husband. Although they were not highly educated, the Haydens did the best they could for young Robert. The family lived in an environment of poverty and danger in Paradise Valley, the ironic name for their inner-city Detroit community. Robert Hayden recalled in Collected Prose that in Paradise Valley, along with the "violence, ugliness, and cruelty, … there were people who retained … a sheltering spiritual beauty and dignity - my mother and my foster father among them - despite sordid and disheartening circumstances.

Very nearsighted as a boy, Hayden was introverted and spent much of his time reading. He enjoyed playing the violin until he had to give it up because of his vision problems. Because of his weak eyesight, he transferred from the inner city's predominantly black Miller High School to predominantly white Northern High School, which provided resources to assist visually-impaired students.

Hayden's graduated from high school in 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression. His family lacked the financial resources to send him to college. Unable to find work, Hayden took some courses at Cass Technical High School. In 1932, he entered Detroit City College (now Wayne State University) where he majored in Spanish. Although he left college in 1936 - just one semester hour short of graduation, he subsequently returned and received his B.A. in 1942.

From 1936 to 1938, Hayden worked as a researcher and writer with the Detroit unit of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Pontheolla Williams noted in Robert Hayden: A CriticalAnalysis of His Poetry that he "completed… [essays] on the anti-slavery activities in Detroit and… in Illinois" and that he "supervise[d] research into local history and folklore." In addition to providing him a livelihood during the Depression, the research proved relevant to Hayden's poetry, for he often meditated on the implications of historical figures and events. The experience also enabled him to learn more about other black writers affiliated with the WPA, such as Richard Wright. However, unlike Wright, Hayden was not drawn to Marxist thought.

Hayden took some graduate courses at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor during the summer of 1938. On June 10, 1940 he married Erma Inez Morris, a musician who had studied piano at Julliard. Their daughter, Maia, was born on October 5, 1942. The same year Hayden began full time graduate study at Michigan, receiving his Master's degree in 1944. He worked as a teaching assistant at Michigan from 1944 to 1946. From 1946 to 1969 he taught at Fisk University. After a brief period at the University of Louisville, he returned to the University of Michigan, his home base for the rest of his career. Hayden held visiting appointments at the University of Washington, the University of Connecticut, Connecticut College, Indiana State University, and Denison University in Ohio.

In 1943 Hayden became a member of the Baha'i faith. In a 1977 interview in Collected Prose, Hayden explained the meshing of Baha'i tenets and his own beliefs. He wrote: "I believe in the oneness of all people and I believe in the basic unity of all religions. I don't believe that races are important. I'm very suspicious of any form of ethnicity or nationalism; I think that these things are very crippling and are very divisive. These are all Baha'i points of view, and my work grows out of this vision.

Developed as a Writer

Hayden had become interested in writing while he was still in elementary school. Williams wrote that "he tried to rewrite the stories of plays and movies he had seen" and that while still in high school, he won an award for a short story entitled "Gold." He developed an interest in modern poetry as a teenager and was especially drawn to Countee Cullen's work. Hayden's poem "Africa," published by Abbott's Monthly in 1931, is reminiscent of Cullen's "Heritage." According to Collected Prose, Hayden met Cullen in 1941. The poet knew of Hayden's work and praised it during their conversation. Earlier, in the 1930s, Hayden had been thrilled to meet Langston Hughes, who read some of his poetry and encouraged him to find his own voice. Although the response dampened his spirits at the time, Hayden later recognized the accuracy and helpfulness of Hughes's critique.

As an apprentice volume, Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940) reflects Hughes's assessment. Even so, Hayden's merit as a poet was discernible, for the volume won the 1938 Jules and Avery Hopwood summer award at the University of Michigan. Hayden won another Hopwood for "The Black Spear," a poetry collection which to date has not been published. W.H Auden, who was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, taught Hayden when he was in graduate school. Hayden characterized the experience in Collected Prose as a marvelous one. Auden's erudition and stimulation made him a memorable teacher. The two men subsequently maintained a warm, though not close, relationship.

Hayden received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in Creative Writing in 1947, during which time he worked on poems published in The Lion and the Archer (1948). The volume features six poems by Hayden and six by Myron O'Higgins. O'Higgins, a consultant and researcher at Fisk, had also received a Rosenwald Fellowship. The Lion contains "A Ballad of Remembrance," which became the title poem in a later volume. The cover art was provided by one of Hayden's students, William Demby, who was attending Fisk as a World War II veteran and who later became famous in his own right as a novelist. Hayden's next volume, Figure of Time: Poems (1955), consisted of 14 poems: 11 new ones and three reprints. The work was illustrated by Aaron Douglas, who had come to prominence for his murals during the Harlem Renaissance and was on the faculty at Fisk.

Both The Lion and the Archer and Figure of Time were published by Hemphill Press, a small black press in Nashville, Tennessee. The volumes were part of the Counterpoise Series at Fisk, a project for which Hayden edited four books. The introductory leaflet to the series reflects Hayden's view that it expresses opposition "to the chauvinistic, the cultish, to special pleading, to all that seeks to limit and restrict creative expression." In phrasing consistent with Baha'i beliefs, the statement supports "the oneness of mankind and the importance of the arts in the struggle for peace and unity," as noted in Collected Prose.

A Ballad of Remembrance (1962) contains some of Hayden's best known poems. "Middle Passage," revised from earlier versions, is a key example. The poem focuses on the Amistad rebellion, in which Africans being brought to the Caribbean took over the ship meant to deliver them to slavery and eventually won their freedom in a United States court. The poem is a collage of various of materials, including journals, depositions, and hymns. A refrain characterizes the middle passage as a "voyage through death / to life upon these shores." Other often anthologized poems from the volume are "O Daedalus Fly Away Home" and "Frederick Douglass," as well as "Home to the Empress of the Blues," a tribute to the blues singer, Bessie Smith.

A section of Ballad draws on Hayden's time in Mexico, where he was based in 1954 and 1955, having received a Ford Foundation Fellowship. The sojourn enabled Hayden to draw on his earlier study of Spanish. Another section of the volume draws on childhood memories in poems such as "The Whipping," "Those Winter Sundays," and "Summertime and the Living." Ballad was first published in London and then by the American firm, October House, as Selected Poems in 1966. "Runagate Runagate," Hayden's stirring tribute to Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, had been published earlier, but was revised for Selected Poems.

Taken together, A Ballad and Selected Poems mark Hayden's maturity as a poet. The change in publishers and the international dimensions of publication also widened Hayden's audience. In 1966, A Ballad of Remembrance was awarded the Grand Prix de la Poésie at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. In the same year, Hayden was named poet laureate of Senegal.

Despite the accolades and greater fame in the sixties, Hayden was also subjected to negative criticism. At the Black Writer's Conference held at Fisk in 1966, Hayden was castigated by many of the conferees as the author of poems that were too erudite and too removed from political and social activism. The conference had been organized by John O. Killens, then writer-in-residence at Fisk. Hayden compared the experience at the Fisk conference to the criticism he received in college when he read his poems before the John Reed Club. There, according to Collected Prose, "he was scathingly criticized for his lack of political awareness. And he was often accused of being too much the individualist and not willing to submit to ideology." In any case, the Fisk experience was painful. In 1969 Hayden resigned from the university.

Williams characterized Hayden's next volume Words in the Mourning Time (1970) as "a cathartic work, his poetic response to the Fisk confrontation with the black militants, an affirmation of his humanism, and the rejection of what he sees as evil." The volume contains Hayden's tribute to Malcolm X, "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz." The opening lines show Hayden's "rejection of evil" as well as his attention to central issues of the African American experience. In accessible, economical use of language, Hayden declares: "The icy evil that struck his father down/ and ravished his mother into madness / trapped him in violence of a punished self / Struggling to break free." The title poem in the volume ponders the meaning of the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and it mourns "for America, self-destructive, self-betrayed."

Hayden's other volumes are The Night Blooming Cereus (1972), Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems (1975), and American Journal (1978 and 1982). These works continue to demonstrate his maturity of thought and concise crafting of language. The title, American Journal, for example, refers to the report of an extraterrestrial trying to discern American values. The alien observes that he will "disguise myself in order to study them unobserved / adapting their varied pigmentations white black / red brown yellow the imprecise and strangering / distinctions by which they live by which they / justify their cruelties to one another." American Journal also includes "The Snow Lamp," which focuses on Matthew Henson and his exploration of the North Pole, and "Letter from Phillis Wheatley," which draws on Wheatley's letters to her black friend Obour.

Hayden was also a critic and editor. He wrote the preface to the reissue of Alain Locke's The New Negro, reissued by Atheneum in 1968. He edited Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro Poets (1967), and for many years, he was the poetry editor for World Order, the Baha'i magazine. He collaborated with James E. Miller and Robert O'Neal in editing many Scott Foresman publications, including American Models: A Collection of Modern Stories (1973), Person Place and Point of View: Factual Prose for Interpretation and Extension (1974), The Lyric Potential (1974), and The Human Condition: Literature Written in the English Language. Another of Hayden's co-edited works, with David J. Burrows and Frederick Lapides, is Afro-American Literature: An Introduction (1971).

The city of Detroit recognized Hayden in 1969 for distinguished achievement by presenting him the Mayor's Bronze Medal. In 1970 he received an award from the National Institute of Letters for distinguished achievement in poetry. In 1975 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Poets. Hayden served two terms as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, 1976 - 77 and 1977 - 78. He was the first African American poet to hold this post.

Hayden held honorary degrees from Grand Valley State College in Allendale, Michigan, Brown University, Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, Wayne State University, and Fisk University. On January 4, 1980, he was among a group of American poets honored by President Jimmy Carter at the White House. Hayden was too ill to attend a celebration held in his honor in Ann Arbor on February 24, 1980. He died the next day.

Although he saw the relevance of race to the human condition, Hayden refused to be limited in his subject matter. At the same time, he understood and demonstrated that poems on a racial theme inherently deal with the human condition. In an interview with John O'Brien for Interviews With Black Writers, Hayden summarized his philosophy. "I am convinced," he said, "that if poets have any calling… beyond the attempt to produce viable poems--and that in itself is more than enough--it is to affirm the humane, the universal, the potentially divine in the human creature." Hayden affirmed that calling unequivocally.

Books

Harris, Trudier, ed. Afro-American Writers, 1940 - 1955. Gale Research, 1988.

Hatcher, John. From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robert Hayden. George Ronald, 1984.

Nicholas, Xavier, ed. "Robert Hayden and Michael S. Harper: A Literary Friendship." Callaloo 17 (Fall 1994): 975 - 1016.

O'Brien, John, ed. Interviews with Black Writers. Liveright, 1973.

Williams, Pontheolla T. Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry. University of Illinois Press, 1987.

poet; educator

Personal Information

Full name Robert Earl Hayden; born Asa Bundy Sheffey, August 4, 1913, in Detroit, MI; died of heart failure February 25, 1980, in Ann Arbor, MI; son of Asa and Gladys Ruth (Finn) Sheffey; foster son of William and Sue Ellen (Westerfield) Hayden; married Erma I. Morris (a pianist and composer), June 15, 1940; children: Maia.
Education: Detroit City College (now Wayne State University), B.A., 1936; University of Michigan, M.A., 1944.
Religion: Baha'i.
Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Academy of American Poets, PEN, American Poetry Society, Phi Kappa Phi.

Career

Federal Writers' Project, Detroit, MI, researcher, 1936-40; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, teaching fellow, 1944-46; Fisk University, Nashville, TN, 1946-69, began as assistant professor, became professor of English; University of Michigan, professor of English, 1969-80. Consultant in Poetry, Library of Congress, 1976-78. Visiting poet and lecturer at numerous American universities.

Life's Work

Robert Hayden preferred to think of himself not as a black poet, but rather as an American poet whose work spoke to the universal in the human condition. Although many of his best-known works explore the African American experience, Hayden avoided politics and polemic, opting instead for an artistic body of work in the grand tradition of English literature. He labored in near obscurity for much of his life, only becoming recognized as a preeminent poet in the 1960s and 1970s. Only now is his work being given the critical evaluation it deserves by a new generation of scholars.

Hayden believed that literature written by blacks should be judged by the same critical standards used to judge any work in English. This stance proved distinctly unpopular with younger black poets, who sought to create and define a wholly black literature. While serving as a professor of English at Fisk University in the late 1960s, Hayden came under attack by some of these younger poets, but he never wavered in his defense of critical standards and the aims of great art. As his own relatively slender body of work attracted more attention, he found support from other poets of all races and creeds who shared his views. In 1976 he was named Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress--an honor equivalent to England's Poet Laureate.

Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey in 1913. His young, poverty- stricken parents separated soon after he was born, and he was adopted by William and Sue Ellen Hayden, who were also poor but who worked hard and held their children to high standards. The family lived in a Detroit ghetto with the ironic nickname Paradise Valley. Life was hard there, and Hayden's parents often quarreled. Nevertheless, both of them were deeply interested in their adopted son's achievements.

A severe case of myopia hampered Hayden's ability to play active games. His mother fought for his right to attend classes for the partially sighted, and he learned to read by holding the book six inches from his face--a practice he had to continue throughout his life. He also learned how to play the violin, but as the music became more complicated he had more and more trouble seeing it. He had to drop out of the Sunday school orchestra at his local Baptist church, but the loss did not trouble him deeply--he still had his books and his writing.

Hayden began writing poems, stories, and plays while still in elementary school. By the time he reached high school he was sure he wanted to be a poet. He spent much of his spare time reading novels and poetry, drawing solace from literature in the face of his troubled family life. When Hayden was a teenager, his natural mother returned to Detroit and sought a relationship with him. He welcomed contact with her, but her presence only increased the tensions in his adoptive household. Relief came in the form of the books he read and pondered, including George Eliot's Romola, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, and Edward George Bulwer- Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Hayden is quoted as saying: "I loved those books, partly because they took me completely out of the environment I lived in, and they were full of strange and wonderful things that I'd had no direct experience with."

In 1932 Hayden earned a scholarship to attend Detroit City College (now Wayne State University). There he majored in Spanish and minored in English, assuming that he would teach school when he graduated. After earning his bachelor's degree in 1936 he found a Depression-era job as a folklore researcher with the Federal Writers' Project in Detroit. He supplemented the meager federal income by serving as a theater, movie, and music critic for the Michigan Chronicle, a black weekly newspaper. In his spare time he continued to produce poetry, and his first volume, Heart-Shape in the Dust, was published by Detroit's Falcon Press in 1940. That same year he married pianist Erma Morris.

In 1941 Robert and Erma Hayden spent a brief period in New York City, where Mrs. Hayden studied music at Juilliard. While there the Haydens were invited to dinner by renowned Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, who had read Hayden's first book and liked it. The opportunity to meet and talk to one of his favorite poets had a profound effect on Hayden. He was inspired to pursue his own literary ambitions quite seriously. When the couple returned to Michigan, Hayden enrolled in graduate courses at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. By 1942 he was a full-time student, taking courses in playwrighting, poetry, and literature.

One of Hayden's teachers in Ann Arbor was the renowned American poet W. H. Auden. Hayden later described his professor as "awe- inspiring" and "absolutely brilliant," the perfect mentor for an apprentice artist struggling to learn both the craft of writing and the necessary self-awareness that poetry demands. Some critics feel that it was Auden who most strongly influenced the critical and creative principles that would form the basis for Hayden's poetry. Whatever the case, Hayden began to get recognition for his work while at the University of Michigan. He twice won the prestigious Jules and Avery Hopwood Award for poetry while at the school, and after earning his bachelor's degree he became the first black teaching fellow in the university's English department.

During his student days at Michigan Hayden also embarked upon a lifelong affiliation with the Baha'i faith, a Middle Eastern religion that emphasizes racial harmony, unity of religious faiths, and a coming world peace. The Baha'i world view informed many of Hayden's mature works and influenced his personal philosophy of poetry, as James Mann noted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Mann wrote that Baha'i "teaches that the work of the artist is considered a form of worship, a service to mankind that has spiritual significance. Hayden was sustained in his life as a poet by the assurance of his faith that his work is of spiritual value."

By 1946 Hayden had published two of his best-known poems, "Middle Passage" and "Frederick Douglass." The 177-line "Middle Passage" is a modernist poem treating upon various aspects of the slave trade to colonial America, including the thoughts of slave traders and a narrative of a slave rebellion aboard a Cuban vessel. The poet also includes passages on the names of slave ships, the yarns of old sailors, and even bits of hymns the slave traders sang. "Frederick Douglass" is a shorter, unrhymed sonnet about the famous black orator who began his life as an abused and runaway slave. The first draft of "Middle Passage" appeared in the 1946 edition of Cross Section, an annual poetry anthology. "Frederick Douglass" was published in the Atlantic Monthly magazine.

On the strength of his scholarship and his published poetry, Hayden was offered an assistant professorship at Fisk University, a predominantly black school in Nashville, Tennessee. Not surprisingly, he had a great deal of difficulty adjusting to life in the South, where institutionalized segregation affected everything from seating on buses to use of restrooms, restaurants, and movie houses. Mann wrote: "By necessity the Haydens taught themselves to live with segregation, though never to adjust to it, and they formed relationships with unprejudiced people of goodwill who had similar interests in the arts. Hayden's concern for the art of poetry prevented him from writing in a polemic way about his experiences during these two decades, although he did employ it as subject matter."

Hayden stayed at Fisk from 1946 until 1969, often teaching as many as five college courses per semester. He also served as an advisor to the student newspaper. The responsibilities left little time for creative writing, and in the 1950s he produced only 11 new published poems, all of which appeared in the slender volume Figure of Time.

The 1960s brought new recognition and new challenges to the poet. In 1962 Hayden published A Ballad of Remembrance (published to a wider American audience as Selected Poems in 1966). The poems in this volume cover a variety of experiences and themes, including the quest for meaning in life, racism, the poet's past, and spiritual redemption through suffering. A Ballad of Remembrance put Hayden on the international literary map when it won the first-ever World Festival of Negro Arts grand prize for poetry in 1966. American critics responded favorably to Selected Poems as well.

Just as Hayden's work was beginning to receive the critical recognition that had long eluded him, he drew the fire of a new generation of black poets who were working from an entirely different perspective. At a black writers' conference held at Fisk in 1966, some of the younger poets attacked Hayden for his refusal to be categorized as a "black poet" and his insistence that his work be judged by all the critical and historical standards brought to bear upon any other English-language poetry. The young militant poets were seeking to create a "black aesthetic" based on the notion that black literature owed no debt to "white" standards and should serve a political purpose as part of a black revolution. As both an artist and a Baha'i Hayden objected to these views, and he did not back down even though the criticism leveled at him stung him deeply. His response, as quoted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, was simple and succinct: "There is no such thing as black literature. There's good literature and there's bad. And that's all!"

Mann wrote: "Nothing impresses one about Hayden so much as his qualities as a man, the nobility with which he confronted his life as it came to him: the terrible pain of racial discrimination; the long period of virtually total obscurity as a writer; the excessively burdensome long hours of teaching; thoughtless and unfair criticism by members of his own race; and finally, the years of honors and fame, borne with humility and grace. Having experienced extremes of fortune, he endured with dignity and with the highest principles."

In 1969 Hayden returned home to the University of Michigan as a professor of English. While there he published three volumes of verse, two of which--Words in the Mourning Time and American Journal--were nominated for the National Book Award. In 1976 Hayden was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, an honored position that brought him to the nation's capital for two years. He also undertook a greater number of poetry readings and visiting professorships at numerous American colleges and universities. One of his students, Michael R. Brown, recalled a Hayden reading in a Commentary essay: "At his reading he took a back seat to the young poets and his friends. His reading was shorter, but balanced ... art, people, and the iron lessons of history. Without teaching, he put the young poets to school, and they noticed."

Hayden's health began to fail as the 1970s progressed. He died of heart failure in the University of Michigan's hospital early in 1980. Two volumes of his work were published posthumously: a prose collection from the University of Michigan Press, and Robert Hayden: Collected Poems by Liveright. Some observers have claimed that Hayden might have published more poetry had he been less burdened by his duties as a teacher, but in fact the poet was a perfectionist who spent long hours revising and re-working poems, even those that had already been published.

Hayden once described himself as "a romantic who has been forced to be realistic," and indeed his work never shied from the realities of racism and cruelty. Nevertheless, his Baha'i faith provided him with an essentially optimistic outlook. According to Norma R. Jones in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the writer's work "deals with the awful realities of American history; yet, because he sees the future of the nation as a passage from death to life, he is more a poet of hope than of despair. His chosen role as an American poet, yet aware of the injustices perpetuated against his race, gives him a unique perspective in American letters." Jones concludes that Robert Hayden "has demonstrated that in one man the black poet and the American poet can be the same."

Awards

Jules and Avery Hopwood Poetry Award from University of Michigan, 1942 and 1944; Julius Rosenwald fellow, 1947; Ford Foundation fellow in Mexico, 1954-55; World Festival of Negro Arts grand prize, 1966, for A Ballad of Remembrance; Russell Loines Award, National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1970; National Book Award nomination, 1971, for Words in Mourning Time; Academy of American Poets fellow, 1977; Michigan Arts Foundation Award, 1977; National Book Award nomination, 1979, for American Journal.

Works

Writings

• Heart-Shape in the Dust, Falcon Press (Detroit), 1940.
• (With Myron O'Higgins) The Lion and the Archer, Hemphill Press (Nashville), 1948.
• Figure of Time: Poems, Hemphill Press, 1955.
• A Ballad of Remembrance, Breman (London), 1962, revised as Selected Poems, October House (New York), 1966.
• Words in Mourning Time, October House, 1970.
• The Night-Blooming Cereus, Breman, 1972.
• Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems, Liveright, 1975.
• American Journal, Effendi Press (Taunton, MA), 1978, revised and enlarged edition, Liveright, 1982.
• Collected Prose: Robert Hayden, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor), 1984.
• Robert Hayden: Collected Poems, Liveright, 1985.
• Also editor of volumes such as Afro-American Literature: An Introduction, 1971; The Human Condition: Literature Written in the English Language, 1974; and The United States in Literature, 1979.
• Contributor of poetry to magazines and anthologies.

Further Reading

Books

• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Gale, 1980, pp. 310-18.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 76: Afro-American Writers, 1940-1955, Gale, 1988, pp. 75-88.
• Fetrow, Fred M., Robert Hayden, Twayne, 1984.
• Greenbert, Robert M., American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Scribner, 1981.
• Hatcher, John, From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robert Hayden, George Ronald, 1984.
• Miller, R. Baxter, editor, Black American Poets Between Wrolds, 1940-1960, University of Tennessee Press, 1986, pp. 43-76.
• Williams, Pontheolla Taylor, Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry, University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Periodicals

• Commentary, September 1980, pp. 66-69.
• Negro Digest, June 1966, pp. 164-75.
• New York Times, February 27, 1980, p. B5.
• Obsidian, spring 1981, special issue on Hayden.
• World Order, fall 1981, special issue on Hayden.

— Anne Janette Johnson

(hā'dən) , 1913–80, American poet, b. Detroit. After earning his M.A. at the Univ. of Michigan, he taught there and at Fisk Univ. Although the tone of his poems is quiet and often loving, he has a considerable gift for irony and his insights can be shattering. His Ballad of Remembrance (1962) was awarded a prize at the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966.

Bibliography

See his Collected Poems (1985).

(1913-1980)

1940	Heart-Shape in the Dust. The debut collection by the Detroit-born African American poet includes a long protest poem, "These Are My People," which describes the lot of blacks during the Depression, based on the author's observations while a researcher for the Federal Writers' Project.
1955	Figure of Time. Hayden's only publication during the decade is this pamphlet containing new and previously published work treating human suffering. It is noteworthy as the first of Hayden's works to show his religious beliefs after his conversion to the Baha'i faith.
1962	A Ballad of Remembrance. Hayden's collection shows the poet's shift from predominantly black subjects to a wider range of interest, which will dominate his subsequent publications. It wins the grand prize at the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal.
1970	Words in the Mourning Times. Hayden's collection features meditations on the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and the war in Vietnam. It is the first of three volumes that show an expansion of his range to consider metaphysical and spiritual as well as racial issues; the others are The Night-Blooming Cereus (1972) and Angle of Ascent (1975).
1978	American Journal. Hayden's final collection continues his exploration of the achievements of African Americans, with poems about Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Matthew Hensen, the black explorer who accompanied Robert Peary to the North Pole.

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