Robert Hayden was a leading American poet and a representative figure in African-American literary giants. He was a maker of correction in politics, and this legacy still continues. Hayden is best known for his poetical sequences though his lyrical poems are also of the best quality. Hayden’s literary movement is invocation like Hart Crane and W. B. Yeats who invoked Brooklyn Bridge and the Tower, respectively.
Some critics oversimplify the basis of his rhetorical art and regard him as invoking black history. Though this can be detrimental to the fame of his poetry because this incessant invocation to the West African past can be called inauthenticity.
Hayden is the most authentic and original of his generation of poets. Like his influencer W. B. Yeats, he was also a religious poet. The difference between them is that Yeats wrote poetry about an unknown God while Hayden followed the Baha’i sect. Hayden’s highest achievements are his aesthetic elitism and inwardness.
His poetic integrity was absolute and invariably courageous. He had a great command of both American and British literary traditions and was well-read. In his poetry, the extraordinary passages’ dispassionate tonality stems from his poetic reticence.
He has formed a resistant force against ecstatic hyperboles of Hart Crane and hyperbolic ironies of Eliot through understatement or rhetoric of litotes. Being a black Baha’i, Hayden struggles for universal moral salvation. An emblem for this attribute is his hero in Amistad Mutiny.
This hero was in quest of a blessing for America that would make it the ideal which the forefathers of Americans sought. But he isn’t able to realize this dream and failure seems inevitable. There is daring and high rhetoric seen in his works like Runagate Runagate and Middle Passage. Though the former work lacks the intricacy that the later work has.
Hayden was called people’s poet because of his easily comprehensible language and representation of the common sentiment. He remained the poet laureate of Senegal and later became the poet laureate of America. He was reluctant to call himself a negro poet, and for this reason, he was severely criticized.
Though he wrote several black history poems, he preferred to call himself an American poet instead of a black poet. In truth, he was both and gave voice to both thoughts. His art was a fusion of all the American communities and a representative of the American experience.
His originality of poetry was the result of his reading of the works of Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Along with that, English classics added to his precision. His every line represents a shade of American experience, and for this reason, he didn’t want to be content with a narrower title instead of the American poet.
His work is conceptually expansive and technically gifted. Along with the positive aspects of American life, his works also represent the plight of black Americans. He wrote political poetry as well, and there are passages about the Vietnam war.
In short, he was a versatile writer and truly deserved the title of American poet because of his representation of various aspects of American life.
A Short Biography of Robert Hayden
Robert Earl Hayden was born on August 4th, 1913 in Paradise Valley neighborhood, Detroit, Michigan. His parents were Asa and Ruth Sheffey, and they had separated before he was born. After his birth, he was taken by a neighbor family and raised by them. His foster parents were William Hayden and Sue Ellen Westerfield.
He spent a traumatic childhood because of the issues between Haydens and his mother’s struggle to win his affection. Fights at his home and chronic anger led to depression in his life which continued making his life miserable throughout.
He had problems; was slightstatured and nearsighted, and for this reason, he was often ostracized by his fellows. For this reason, he spent his time in seclusion and read literature, developing both eye and ear for literature. He attended Wayne State University, formerly Detroit City College.
He earned a majors degree in Spanish and minor in English. He left this institute before completing the degree leaving one credit short. He worked on the Federal Writers’ Project and researched black folk culture and history.
He left this project in 1938 and got married in 1940 to Erma Morris. His wife was a pianist. This year he published his first volume of poetry and Heart Shape in Dust. He enrolled in the University of Michigan in 1941. There he took courses in poetry, playwriting, and literature. His wife had Baha’i faith, and he soon followed her, converting to this religion.
He raised his daughter on this faith. He is one of the best known Baha’i poets. He also remained the student of W. H. Auden when he was pursuing his master’s degree. He completed his degree in 1942 and taught several years at Michigan. In 1942 he went to Fisk University, and there he taught for twenty-three years. He returned to Michigan in 1969.
He claimed the attention of critics with the publication of Selected Poems in 1966. Baha’i religion promoted the unity of humanity, and for this reason, he was against the black separatist movements. When in the 1960s, the black movement was blooming, he isolated himself from it and made his own identity.
In 1975 he was elected to American Society of Poets. He worked in the Library of Congress as a poetry consultant. During this time he worked at different universities as a visiting faculty.
He earned several awards due to his outstanding works. These awards include the Grand Prize for Poetry (1966), Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Jules and Avery Hopwood Poetry Award, Ford Foundation Fellowship, Michigan Arts Foundation Award, etc. Hayden died in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1980.
Robert Hayden’s Writing Style
Hayden’s work is of rich variety though he wrote in formal poetic forms. It is his voices and techniques that make him distinct from his fellow poets. In his poetry, he used various voices which include the ironic speech of black folk, cheerful and energetic poetic diction which chills his readers.
His characters are drawn from stark vividness, and through this use, he changes the form of commonplaces of history and the cardinal points. Though his poems are formal, this formality is original, non-traditional, and strict though not severely restricting.
There is a precision of line in his poems. This precision leads to the molding of imagination into the fragmented stanzas, which present the image as a puzzle and give their meaning when they are fitted together.
Image and Idea
Hayden like Yeats Hayden’s search for new ideas and meanings began when he had reached the middle of his career. His work, The Night-Blooming Cereus, is considered a breakthrough in his corpus. This work was a transformation in the ideas of his works which, according to Hayden, had begun to become ‘stagnant.’
He has used struggle as a recurrent theme in his poetry which not only fits his choice of poetry but his use of paradox as well. Through imagery, he changes the readers’ perception of things. An example of it is stars that challenge the commonly held ideas of the readers.
He makes the connection of stars to Baha’i faith. In this faith, the nine-pointed star refers to perfection and this image is used in several places in his poetry. This number, nine, also refers to the name Baha, who was the founder of this religion.
There are also references to popular Greeks myths and characters in his poetry. He uses the metaphor of mica to represent the sea and the sky. This metaphor is borrowed from stars, and thus it completes the circle of the universe.
Anti-Epic
His famous poem, Middle Passage, is considered an anti-epic and has received much critical attention. This work shows resistance to generic classification due to the virtuoso performance. This work is an epic which discusses civil war and slavery from a black man’s point of view.
There are traces of epic miniature, but a thorough study shows that this epic is different from the traditional epic. Though Hayden has used all epic conventions in this work, through the inversion technique, he has made it an anti-epic. There is a consistent, ironic inversion and alteration of features.
In the traditional epic, there is a glorification of the hero, but in Hayden’s work, the case is opposite. In Middle Passage, he presents various voices of the slave trade. Through this approach, Cinquez is ennobled, who is an anti-hero. He represents his race’s struggle for his nation, blacks, who were oppressed.
Some epic conventions in this work are explicitly inverted while others are subtly changed. There are references to the real names of Spanish and English ships that brought black slaves to America. Through these names, situational irony is expressed, which is both literary and real.
These inversions have far-reaching thematic impacts. An example of it is shore which is not a symbol of hope in this case rather reinforces the sense of oppression. In this work, Hayden has retained the historical perspectives and through them transcends the hero Cinquez. Thus with the inversion, contrasting style and epic characteristics, Hayden has made this work an anti-epic.
After Modernism
Ralph Ellison’s novel serves as a backdrop for the modernist and postmodernist works of Robert Hayden and his fellow poets. These works begin where they end. After-Modernism can be called as an exchange of epilogues between modernist and to-be postmodernist writers. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man can be called a call for exchanges.
The hero in this work is in a ‘hibernation’ and awaits awakening. Jay Wright, Robert Hayden, Michael Harper’s several poems are a response to this epilogue, laying the foundation of works interconnected with this work. Robert Hayden’s Elegies for Paradise Valley is a sequence of poems which is a response to Ellison’s work.
This work of Hayden doesn’t respond to the questions directly. It is a post-hibernation voice that is mature and re-embraces adopted kin and bloodline. These elegies are eight in number and illuminate the relationship of its residents to this place. Such images are orchestrated, which give the image of both birth and burial.
This is a vision of both the Garden and the pit of fall. There are negative definitions, images of shelter, time, and place. Various characters from this place and their relationship with the poet are described.
These works also show the way to imagination and chaos, both of which lie beyond the borders of reality.
Covenant of Timelessness and Time: Symbolism and History
In Angle of Ascent, Hayden has united the bipolar extremes of symbolist with a historian. His symbolic imagination is intent on redeeming the world that is on the way to destruction. There are discontinuities in his memory, but he is resolute in presenting every echo and shadow of human experience.
Imagination and actual happenings in history are allied together in a manner that both of them are incomplete without each other. He creates a relationship between material and spiritual, and this makes him a part of the tradition led by Emerson. He likens Malcolm X to Ahab in El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.
He approaches death from a different angle and calls it a profound intensification of life. Hayden derives power for his voice from the conflict between maelstrom and quiet reflecting pool.
The Performers, two high-rise window cleaners’ modesty, and daring are discussed, which is ironically used in the pretext of some metaphysical strutting. Though at some places he loses his symbolic balance it is not like Melville. There is a harmonization of discordant sensation in Hayden’s poetry.
Use of History
History is one of the most treated subjects in Hayden’s poetry. He has used it in his initial poetry which was published when he was a student at the University of Michigan. His initial poems cover the period of the Civil War and Slavery in his collection The Black Spear.
These poems cover the rise of black heroes from obscurity and oppression to fame. His poems like Runagate Runagate, The Ballad of Nat Turner, etc. take their content from various notebooks, journals, histories, and narratives about the black slave trade, slave revolts, plantation life, etc. In The Black Spear, the poems emerge from the sufferings of the black people.
His reconstruction of the past in his works was a purgation from the load of memory that he carried. His work was influenced by Stephen Vincent Benet more than Auden, and this use of history is Benet’s influence. In Middle Passage, Hayden has tried to reconcile Christianity and slave-trade. Though his narrative is complicated, but he establishes it successfully.
There are black resistance, rebellion, and hatred towards them shown. There is also a description of lust factor towards black wenches that were taken by slave owners. Behind alcohol and wenches, every otherworldly issue is lost.
Meditation on Art
He reflects on the American nation as the destroyer of the values that it has set to be followed. In his collection, Words in the Mourning Time, there are poems whose titles suggest a radical shift in the nature of his work. There are various themes and allusions which are reflective of chaotic times. These also contemplate the value of art in such times.
These poems suggest his coming in terms with his profession as a poet in the time of despair. There are delicate ironies, but still, a serenity pervades the work. He gives the perception of artistic work as an incarnation, and this becomes a belief for an artist like faith for a religiously faithful.
He suggests the addition of the lost dimension of life which can never be achieved in real life, except art which can realize it in memory. He also recognizes the limitations of art. In his poem Monet’s Waterlilies, he recognizes that the portrayal by the artist is but an approximation, a ‘shadow’ which can be lost. He expunged some lines from this poem in a later edition.
This is a suggestion of the fact that beauty lies not only in the final product but in the process of creation as well. His poem The Lions focuses on the inseparability of the object of art from the creative process. It reinforces Yeats’ idea that dancer can’t be separated from dance. He promotes the idea that the ideal and real are interdependent.
Changing Permanences: Historical and Literary Revisionism
In the collection, Middle Passage, Hayden looks at America from an alien eye. He notes the changing society of ‘enlightened primitives’ and ‘charming savages.’ There is a stranger and alien observer in his works who speaks for him, observing the ensuing changes. Through this perspective, Hayden brings the cultural, historical identity, and language that shapes the individual identity.
He is a chronicler of transformations, changes, and metamorphoses. In his poem Names, he expresses his anguish for his questioned identity, which was the result of changing the name. For him, identity is the result of history and historicity. He looks at himself from a double perspective, from the eye of a stranger and native.
In the same manner, he is not a conventional historian but a modern anthropologist. He studies the language and myths like that of an unfamiliar culture. His poem Middle Passage is a fine example of work that links literary and historical revisionism. This work is incoherent, and through it, he conveys the message of a language that is non-static and doesn’t have fixed meanings.