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Robert Hayden |
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For many years, Robert Hayden occupied a difficult and ambiguous position in American poetry. Marginalized by the literary mainstream at the start of his career as a "Negro poet," he was considered not black enough by more militant writers and theorists in the 1960s. Such issues of literary identity had an upsetting parallel, the full extent of which he would only belatedly discover, in his personal life. Throughout decades of neglect and scorn, he clung steadfastly to his artistic and human values, producing a body of work whose artistry and emotional richness placed him at or very near the front rank of an especially talented generation of American poets.
Robert Hayden was born in Detroit, Michigan, on August 4, 1913. His natural parents were Asa Sheffey, a former coal miner, and Ruth (born Gladys Finn) Sheffey, who was of racially mixed ancestry. Their marriage was unsuccessful, and the couple parted before the birth of their son. His mother gave him over to be raised by another couple, William and Sue Ellen Hayden, and left for Buffalo, New York. Robert Hayden kept contact with her and always enjoyed their times together, vacations from the drab life of his lower-class Detroit neighborhood, spent in the company of a doting and vivacious mother. His one childhood visit to his father, then living in Gary, Indiana, was less successful: the boy was angered by his father's attacks on his beloved mother, and was put off by his lack of understanding of the bookish and withdrawn child who was his son. Similar tensions existed in Hayden's relations with his foster father, William Hayden, a laborer and sternly devout Baptist. His wife, Sue Ellen, was still entranced by her memories of a more glamorous earlier marriage, and occasionally took out her present frustrations on the young boy. Out of these relationships would come two of Hayden's finest poems, "The Whipping" and "Those Winter Sundays." In his childhood, Hayden was often in the middle of an emotional tug of war between his natural mother and his foster parents, and his presence in the Haydens' home was at times a source of strain and contention, in light of the fact that he was not really their son. Many years later, he was deeply upset to discover that the Haydens had never formally adopted him, and that his given, and still legal, name was in fact Asa Bundy Sheffey.
Until Hayden's late teens, his neighborhood was racially mixed, and his playmates included Jewish and Italian children ("The Rabbi" and "Elegies for Paradise Valley" are among several fine poems to emerge from this aspect of his experience). His extreme nearsightedness limited the scope of his physical activities, and was also responsible for his being sent to Northern High School, a largely white institution. Having written and made up stories from a very early age, he discovered modern poetry at the age of sixteen, and refocused his literary energies in that direction. He graduated from high school in 1930, the year that America began to feel the full effects of the stock market crash of the previous October. He worked a number of odd jobs, including typing, clerking in a grocery store, and even issuing policy slips for an illegal numbers game. Meanwhile, he continued to take postgraduate classes.
In 1931, a poem of Hayden's called "Africa," written in response to Countee Cullen's "Heritage," was accepted by Abbott's Monthly, a national black publication. Cullen also figured indirectly in an incident that would be a turning point in Hayden's life. While Hayden was waiting in a welfare line, the case worker inquired about a book he was holding. He showed her Cullen's Copper Sun and told her that he too was going to be a poet, to which she replied that he ought to have a college education, and she gave him the name of a man who was able to arrange a scholarship for him to attend Detroit City College (now Wayne State University), where he enrolled in 1932. He majored in Spanish, with a view toward a teaching career, but left in 1936, one credit short of graduation. He was employed for the next several years by the Works Progress Administration, a government employment program for artists. He did research for the WPA into black history and folklore, a formative experience for the young man who would later write memorable poems about Phillis Wheatley, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and the Amistad uprising. In 1937, his poem "Autumnal" was included in American Stuff, an anthology of work by WPA writers. During this period, Hayden met Langston Hughes. Hayden, a serious student of the craft of poetry, was taken aback by Hughes's admission that he had never been able to write a sonnet. In 1938, Hayden began graduate studies at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. He also formed friendships with John Malcolm Brinnin and other young white poets, and interested himself in leftist social causes.
The year 1940 brought a number of major changes to Hayden's life. He left the WPA and began writing for the Michigan Chronicle. In June, he married Erma Inez Morris, a concert pianist and music teacher, forming a bond of great depth and closeness that would last for the rest of his life (Maia, their only child, would be born on October 5, 1942). He published Heart-Shape in the Dust, his first book of poems, with a local publisher. He later considered the collection derivative and immature, and never reprinted any of its poems. In the following year, he studied poetry at the University of Michigan with W. H. Auden, who influenced him with his emphasis on poetry as an art that seeks to present the materials of life in all their complexity and strangeness, rather than a medium for social or political commentary that oversimplifies reality in the interest of some extra-artistic goal. In 1943, Hayden achieved an entree of sorts into the poetry mainstream when his poem "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home" was published in Poetry magazine. In that same year, through his wife's influence, he became a convert to the Bahá'i faith, whose tenets of progressive revelation, integration of faith and scientific knowledge, and the oneness of all humanity were perfectly suited to Hayden's questing spirit, his intellectual approach, and the fundamental decency and generosity of his character. (His poem "Electrical Storm" uses a personal experience as the basis for an intriguing meditation on the conflict between faith and knowledge.)
From 1944 to 1946, Hayden was a teaching assistant at the University of Michigan. In the latter year, he secured an assistant professorship in English at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, which would become his professional home for the next twenty-three years. They were, for the most part, years of hard work and poetic obscurity. Although nominally writer in residence at Fisk, Hayden found himself burdened with heavy teaching loads that included a preponderance of composition classes. And as he continued throughout the 1950s and '60s to write some of the most carefully crafted and impressive poetry of his time, his publications in those years were a series of small books issued by marginal and/or foreign presses, works which attracted no attention.
The year 1966 proved to be another watershed in Hayden's life and career. He won the Grand Prix de la Poesie at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, and was named Poet Laureate of Senegal. And he published his Selected Poems, a slender volume presenting the best work of several decades, which finally began to bring him recognition as a serious poet from reviewers and readers in his own country. In that same year, however, Hayden was deeply upset and alienated by his treatment at his own university. At the First Black Writers' Conference at Fisk in April 1966, Hayden was denounced by more militant writers. They regarded themselves as blacks first and poets second, and thus took issue with his statement that there was only good poetry and bad, dismissing him as a pathetic irrelevance for his emphasis on the quality of one's work above all racial, social, or other considerations. There was a deeper irony to this confrontation, in that Hayden had, without stridency or propaganda, written much finer poetry on the black experience in America than most of his detractors would ever achieve. He was deeply hurt by this abusive treatment, and by his having been supplanted as writer in residence, after more than twenty years of service to Fisk, by the novelist John Oliver Killens, who had organized the conference. Consequently, he resigned his professorship in 1969, and became a professor of English at the University of Michigan, a post he held for the rest of his life.
The 1970s brought Hayden increasing recognition by the only standard whose judgment he accepted, that of the term "poet" unmodified by any descriptive or limiting adjectives. He published major collections in 1970 and 1975. In 1975, he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of American Poets, from which organization he received an award of $10,000. Also in 1975, he was appointed to a two-year term as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (the position now known as the poet laureateship), the first African-American writer to hold that post. He was so successful in his fulfillment of his responsibilities, especially in his encouragement of younger writers, that he was appointed to a second two-year term. In January 1980, he was among a group of American poets honored by President Jimmy Carter in a White House ceremony. On February 24, 1980, the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan presented "A Tribute to Robert Hayden." Unfortunately, Hayden himself, who had been suffering from cancer for over a year and who also was ill with influenza, was unable to attend, and in fact died the following day. He was sixty-six years old.
One cannot but be pleased that Hayden lived to enjoy some recognition, however belated, of his accomplishments. And, with the cooling of the passions and polarizations of the 1960s and '70s, both his writings and his example have come to be more highly valued by African-American writers and critics. And yet, until he has been firmly fixed in the consciousness of those who care about literature as, quite simply, one of the finest poets of his generation, Robert Hayden will not have been given his due.
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