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Authors
Robert Hayden (1913-1980)
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Hayden’s Collected Poems appeared in 1985; his Collected Prose appeared the previous year. Both were edited by Frederick Glaysher. Fred M. Fetrow’s Robert Hayden (1984) is a critical study of Hayden’s work. Essays on Hayden’s work appear in the journals Antioch Review (1997) and MELUS (1998) and in Harold Bloom’s edited volume Robert Hayden (2005).
Born in Michigan, Robert Hayden grew up in what he ironically called "Paradise Valley," a poor Detroit neighborhood. Financial difficulties forced him to leave college early, and he joined the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration, for two years researching the history of the abolition movement and Michigan's underground railroad. One of the most important poets of the African American experience, Hayden chronicles contemporary racial life in urban centers as well as the nineteenth-century slave trade. His best-known poem, Middle Passage (1982), is a multivocal account of the slave ships that brought blacks from Africa to the New World as well as the story of a slave rebellion aboard the ship Amistad. In 1976 Hayden was appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, the first African American to hold the position. He taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, until his death. Hayden's volumes of poetry include Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), Ballad of Remembrance (1962), and Elegies for Paradise Valley (1978).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
If we use the phrase "African American poet" to describe Hayden, we can put special emphasis on any of those three words. The NAAL selection contains poems which affirm continuity with verse traditions that extend beyond ethnicity and a given historical moment; it contains poems that break many rules in conveying the experience of the African diaspora; and it contains poems that speak directly to the work of other American artists and authors.
1. Hayden's poem Beginnings (1975) is written in five sections, each with a different verse form. Describe how the form of each section reflects its tone and theme. Speculate about why section V (The Crystal Cave Elegy) moves away from the higher formality of section IV.
2. Compare Homage to the Empress of the Blues (1962) to Carl Sandburg's Chicago or William Carlos Williams's The Dance. Describe and account for the similarities and differences. How might Hayden's poem be responding to Sandburg's way of writing about American urban experience?
3. The three sections of Middle Passage (1962) include stanzas of many sorts. Compare section I of Hayden's poem to parts I and II of Eliot's Waste Land or sections I-III of Robert Lowell's Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket (which also uses fragments and quotations). How does Hayden draw upon techniques evident in these two poems to create his own effects in Middle Passage?
4. Consider carefully the long depositions in Middle Passage, which are evidently taken verbatim from historical documents. What is the effect of including these? Are they "poetry"? If so, how do they become so? What effects do they foster in Hayden's poem?
