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Robert Hayden |
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Hayden's poems are of several kinds. There are his tributes to great African-American figures of the past and present, from Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X, and his treatments of significant episodes in the cruel record of African-American experience, poems which clearly call for treatment in the context of HISTORICAL and SOCIOLOGICAL criticism. A sociological approach, combined with the PSYCHOLOGICAL and the BIOGRAPHICAL, will prove illuminating in connection with such autobiographically-based work as "The Whipping" and the moving and beautifully written "Elegies for Paradise Valley." His poems of religious experience, growing out of his Bahá'i faith, may be examined through a MYTHOLOGICAL approach.
A combination of many of these modes with FORMALIST criticism is applicable to many of Hayden's finest achievements, which include, in addition to the better-known and more frequently anthologized pieces, such masterpieces of craft and statement as "A Plague of Starlings" and "The Tattooed Man," both of which are given somewhat extended treatment in John Hatcher's study of Hayden's life and work. "The Tattooed Man" in particular is a disturbing and powerful poem written in Hayden's most compressed and effective manner. It presents its grotesquely self-deformed speaker as a metaphor both of the artistic temperament and of Hayden's own sense of himself, and is central to any full understanding of this poet and of the nature of his accomplishment.
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