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An exquisite body of work celebrating the centennial of...)
An exquisite body of work celebrating the centennial of one of the most important African-American poets of the twentieth century.
Robert Hayden was one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century. He left behind an exquisite body of work, collected in this definitive edition, including A Ballad of Remembrance, Words in the Mourning Time, The Night-Blooming Cereus, Angle of Ascent, and American Journal, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Also included is an introduction by American poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, as well as an afterword by Arnold Rampersad that provides a critical and historical context. In Hayden’s work the actualities of history and culture became the launching places for flights of imagination and intelligence. His voice―characterized by musical diction and an exquisite feeling for the formality of pattern―is a seminal one in American life and literature.
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Nothing superfluous, nothing lacking. William Hazlitt’s...)
Nothing superfluous, nothing lacking. William Hazlitt’s highest praise for good prose can justly be applied to the poetry of Robert Hayden.
In his new poems, as before, but with a new mixture of modes, Hayden takes up, celebrates, and contends with the history of his people. He is involved with his Black Americanness, without being confined by it. The famous story elements can be found here but above all a renewed delight in the revelatory possibilities of the languages. In addition to the new poems, all the best of Hayden’s earlier work is here, including much that has for too long been unavailable.
Robert Hayden was an American writer, poet and educator. He served as a Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1976 to 1978, and became the first African American writer to hold the office.
Background
Robert Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey on August 4, 1913 in Detroit, Michigan, United States. He was the son of Gladys Finn, a former circus employee of Irish heritage, and Asa Sheffey, a black laborer. Because of societal proscriptions against interracial relationships, Gladys gave the infant up to a black couple, William and Sue Ellen Hayden, from whom young Robert derived his name and an early appreciation of African American life and mores.
In years to come, relations between the foster parents and natural parents--particularly his mother, who divorced Sheffey and married Albert Moore, a cabaret owner--were difficult. Hayden never reproached his mother for giving him up; he later described her as a "beautiful woman, vivacious and fond of dancing. "
Grateful to her for introducing him to the theatrical and cultural life of Buffalo, New York, where he visited her on many occasions, Hayden found life with his foster parents trying because of their strict religious views. Hayden's nature and extreme nearsightedness were reproved by his natural father, resulting in strained relations between them throughout their lives. Because of his serious handicap, young Robert showed an early interest in things intellectual and bookish, rather than in sports or things considered more manly.
Education
After elementary school in a poor area of Detroit, Hayden briefly attended the predominantly black Miller High School. Poor sight enabled him to transfer to the predominantly white Northern High School in another part of the city. Hayden referred to the school, with some sarcasm, as a "sight-saving school, " in reference to his exposure to racial prejudice. While there, however, his first serious effort in fiction was made. He won a prize for a short story entitled "Gold. "
In 1930, Hayden graduated from Northern High. During the harsh depression years that followed he did postgraduate study at Cass High School before entering Detroit City College (later Wayne State University) in 1932; he majored in Spanish. Unable to pass a required physics course Hayden did not receive his degree.
He was awarded a combined Bachelor and Master of Arts degree in 1944 from Wayne State University.
Career
Hayden left Wayne State in 1936 and began to pursue a literary career. Joining the Federal Writers Project of the Works Project Administration (WPA) to write poetry in 1936, Hayden developed his interest in African American history and folklore. He came under the influence of both Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, key forces of the Harlem Renaissance. Wright's influence aroused in him an intense social consciousness and a fervor for protest.
The 1930s and 1940s were apprenticeship years for Hayden. His experiences in the WPA found utterance in his first serious collection of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940). Hayden's reputation as a new and vital voice in American poetry was soon recognized.
Despite his efforts to reflect the sensibilities of his race without consciously espousing black political causes, Hayden was seen less as a poet than as a Black poet, which caused him consternation. He believed the problems between groups of people had more to do with class than with race, and he sought to express this view in his work.
In 1946, Hayden began teaching at Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, where he developed an intellectual independence and racial iconoclasm that was to create antagonism with black intellectuals throughout the 1950s and the 1960s. During the 1950s, for example, the overt racism felt but not directly experienced by Hayden himself was the inspiration for his series of poems about the pre-civil rights South, begun in his 1948 collection The Lion and the Archer.
During the 1950s, Hayden was awarded a Ford Foundation grant, which he used to travel in Mexico, where he learned firsthand about "the plight of the Mexican peon. " This was the kind of class struggle that engaged his political consciousness. His experiences and observations during his Mexican travels found utterance in an acclaimed 1962 poetic collection, A Ballad of Remembrance.
The 1960s found Hayden confronted with his most turbulent times. Slipping into his fifties and never having been accepted as a voice for black leadership, he was labeled an Uncle Tom because of his assimilationist feelings. Ironically, while ridiculed by militant students, his stature among his peers grew.
He was visiting poet-in-residence at Indiana State University in 1967. He left Fisk in 1969 to become full professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, a position he held until his death. During the 1970s, Hayden continued to gain recognition for his poetry. His appointment in 1976 as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress was in addition to his being the recipient of honorary doctorates from four major universities.
He continued to publish until his death of heart failure at University Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
While attending graduate school at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Hayden became associated with the British-born poet W. H. Auden, who introduced him to new techniques of poetry associated with contemporary modernists such as William Butler Yeats. This period of broadening poetic development and marriage contributed to his burgeoning religious faith. Indeed, his wife was responsible for his conversion to the Baha'i faith and its belief, he said, in "progressive revelation. "
Politics
During the years with the WPA, Hayden showed an interest in Communism, but he never joined the Communist party and ultimately rejected its ideology as a means toward resolving black problems. At bottom, Hayden was, in his words, "a cultural assimilationist rather than a Marxist. "
Membership
Hayden was a fellow member of the Academy of American Poets.
Personality
Hayden was slight of stature, and had very sensitive nature.
From childhood he had high myopia.
Connections
In June 1940 Hayden married Erma Inez Morris, a concert pianist and music teacher.