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Collected Poems
Robert Hayden (1913-1980) was one of the most important African-American poets of the twentieth century. He left behind an exquisite body of work, collected in this definitive edition, including American Journal , which was nominated for a National Book Award in its first publication. An introduction by Arnold Rampersad provides a biographical portrait of Hayden and a critical context in which to understand his poetry. Robert Hayden was a fellow of the American Academy of Poets, a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, and a professor of English at the University of Michigan. He received numerous awards for his poetry in his lifetime, among them to Hopwood Awards, the Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, and the Russell Loines Award for distinguished poetic achievement from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Arnold Rampersad is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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About the author
Robert Hayden
58 books82 followersRobert Hayden was an American poet, essayist, educator. He was appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1976.
Hayden was elected to the American Academy of Poets in 1975. From 1976 - 1978, Hayden was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the first African American holder of that post), the position which in 1985 became the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Hayden's most famous and most anthologized poem is Those Winter Sundays[citation needed], which deals with the memory of fatherly love and loneliness.
Other famed poems include The Whipping (which is about a small boy being severely punished for some undetermined offense), Middle Passage (inspired by the events surrounding the United States v. The Amistad affair), Runagate, Runagate, and Frederick Douglass.
Hayden’s influences included Wylie, Cullen, Dunbar, Hughes, Bontemps, Keats, Auden and Yeats. Hayden’s work often addressed the plight of African Americans, usually using his former home of Paradise Valley slum as a backdrop, as he does in the poem Heart-Shape in the Dust. Hayden’s work made ready use of black vernacular and folk speech. Hayden wrote political poetry as well, including a sequence on the Vietnam War.
On the first poem of the sequence, he said, “I was trying to convey the idea that the horrors of the war became a kind of presence, and they were with you in the most personal and intimate activity, having your meals and so on. Everything was touched by the horror and the brutality and criminality of war. I feel that's one of the best of the poems.
Hayden was elected to the American Academy of Poets in 1975. From 1976 - 1978, Hayden was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the first African American holder of that post), the position which in 1985 became the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Hayden's most famous and most anthologized poem is Those Winter Sundays[citation needed], which deals with the memory of fatherly love and loneliness.
Other famed poems include The Whipping (which is about a small boy being severely punished for some undetermined offense), Middle Passage (inspired by the events surrounding the United States v. The Amistad affair), Runagate, Runagate, and Frederick Douglass.
Hayden’s influences included Wylie, Cullen, Dunbar, Hughes, Bontemps, Keats, Auden and Yeats. Hayden’s work often addressed the plight of African Americans, usually using his former home of Paradise Valley slum as a backdrop, as he does in the poem Heart-Shape in the Dust. Hayden’s work made ready use of black vernacular and folk speech. Hayden wrote political poetry as well, including a sequence on the Vietnam War.
On the first poem of the sequence, he said, “I was trying to convey the idea that the horrors of the war became a kind of presence, and they were with you in the most personal and intimate activity, having your meals and so on. Everything was touched by the horror and the brutality and criminality of war. I feel that's one of the best of the poems.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 57 reviews
December 21, 2021
Striking and stunning imagery fills this collection. The language is beautiful and exact, and Hayden does a wonderful job capturing memory and place and the individuals that peopled them. Take these lines from the first poem "The Diver" from this collection for instance:
Sank through easeful
azure. Flower
creatures flashed and
shimmered there—
lost images
fadingly remembered.
Swiftly descended
into canyon of cold
nightgreen emptiness.
Freefalling, weightless
as in dreams of
wingless flight,
plunged through infra-
space and came to
the dead ship,
carcass that swarmed with
voracious life.
There's a wide range here, and among these poems are some with historical figures like Fredrick Douglas, Nat Turner, John Brown, Phillis Wheatley, Malcolm X. Robert Hayden was an accomplished poet who unfortunately I didn't know existed until last year when I discovered the wonderful poem "Those Winter Sundays":
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Ever since I started reading poetry books not so long ago, I have discovered that a good poem wonderfully succeeds in seizing and presenting the elements of life (nostalgia, memory, grief, loss, joy etc) which are often elusive, slippery to be grasped and even more difficult to express. I can't help feeling that the great collections I have read so far, this one included, are meant to make up for all those years I spent in darkness, and that it is grace. I'll finish off this review with the wonderful poem Monet's Water Lilies:
Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene great picture that I love
Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, and forever is.
O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.
Sank through easeful
azure. Flower
creatures flashed and
shimmered there—
lost images
fadingly remembered.
Swiftly descended
into canyon of cold
nightgreen emptiness.
Freefalling, weightless
as in dreams of
wingless flight,
plunged through infra-
space and came to
the dead ship,
carcass that swarmed with
voracious life.
There's a wide range here, and among these poems are some with historical figures like Fredrick Douglas, Nat Turner, John Brown, Phillis Wheatley, Malcolm X. Robert Hayden was an accomplished poet who unfortunately I didn't know existed until last year when I discovered the wonderful poem "Those Winter Sundays":
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Ever since I started reading poetry books not so long ago, I have discovered that a good poem wonderfully succeeds in seizing and presenting the elements of life (nostalgia, memory, grief, loss, joy etc) which are often elusive, slippery to be grasped and even more difficult to express. I can't help feeling that the great collections I have read so far, this one included, are meant to make up for all those years I spent in darkness, and that it is grace. I'll finish off this review with the wonderful poem Monet's Water Lilies:
Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene great picture that I love
Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, and forever is.
O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.
April 2, 2017
4.5 stars
Several years ago I went to a poetry recitation competition in Lincolnshire that had two unforgettable consciousness-shifting highlights. One was Ursula Ledbetter's magnificent and hilarious rendering of Tennyson's Lincolnshire dialect poem Northern Farmer: Old Style (yes friends, this is technically my native tongue). The second happened when an elderly man in a shabby coat, fat like a great tenor, shuffled onto the stage and said in a rich, deep, sonorous voice "I'd like to recite a poem by Robert Hayden". The poem was this:
In the introduction Arnold Rampersad suggests that the consciousness of violence is probably the most constant element in his work, whatever the theme. Many poems deal with Black history, both to work through and reflect on the violence perpetrated against Black people and to memorialise and celebrate some heroic figures like Frederick Douglass (who gets a sonnet here) and Sojourner Truth.
Violence is everywhere though; In 'The Tattooed Man' he says 'all art is pain/suffered and outlived'. Elsewhere art is a refuge from violence. In 'Zeus over Redeye' he gives eloquent, conflicted passion to protest against nuclear weapons couched in their absurd machismo: 'guarded/like a sacred phallic grove/Your partial answers reassure/me less than they appall'. His poem 'Perseus' ends
Rampersad shows how Hayden's sense of 'the uses of violence' evolved over the course of his life, towards strong opposition. For example in his poem about Macolm X he celebrates the renunciation of racial hatred, and again in 'Words in the Mourning Time', he calls on us thus:
Perhaps this 'pessimism' is best exemplified by Hayden's gently mocking poem 'Astronauts', in which he asks 'What is it we wish them/to find for us, as/we watch them on our screens?' Part of this scepticism may come from the amusement of a religious man with the childlike excitement of science setting out to find meaning far from the quotidian. Part of it may come from frustration with the White man's untroubled sense of himself as all humanity. In any case, his questions send us into ourselves for answers
Several years ago I went to a poetry recitation competition in Lincolnshire that had two unforgettable consciousness-shifting highlights. One was Ursula Ledbetter's magnificent and hilarious rendering of Tennyson's Lincolnshire dialect poem Northern Farmer: Old Style (yes friends, this is technically my native tongue). The second happened when an elderly man in a shabby coat, fat like a great tenor, shuffled onto the stage and said in a rich, deep, sonorous voice "I'd like to recite a poem by Robert Hayden". The poem was this:
Those Winter SundaysI still think this is one of the most perfect poems I know, and I was grateful enough to buy this book without further research to thank Hayden for giving me a poem that shows me how to feel for my own dad... The book has finally reached the top of my pile and I have discovered that he was an African-American poet, and converted to his wife's Ba'hai religion from his adoptive parents Baptist faith, so I read and (mis)interpret his work through this knowledge.
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labour in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
In the introduction Arnold Rampersad suggests that the consciousness of violence is probably the most constant element in his work, whatever the theme. Many poems deal with Black history, both to work through and reflect on the violence perpetrated against Black people and to memorialise and celebrate some heroic figures like Frederick Douglass (who gets a sonnet here) and Sojourner Truth.
Violence is everywhere though; In 'The Tattooed Man' he says 'all art is pain/suffered and outlived'. Elsewhere art is a refuge from violence. In 'Zeus over Redeye' he gives eloquent, conflicted passion to protest against nuclear weapons couched in their absurd machismo: 'guarded/like a sacred phallic grove/Your partial answers reassure/me less than they appall'. His poem 'Perseus' ends
Yet even as I lifted up the headI can't help but think of Alice Walker's discussion of Medusa in The Temple of my Familiar" where she interprets the 'gorgon' with her 'snake' hair and fatal 'ugliness' as an archetype for Black Woman, a defensive European demonisation of an African mother goddess. How does this relate to the 'hero''s overflowing will-to-violence?
and started from that place
of gazing silences and terrored stone,
I thirsted to destroy.
None could have passed me then -
no garland-bearing girl, no priest
or staring boy - and lived.
Rampersad shows how Hayden's sense of 'the uses of violence' evolved over the course of his life, towards strong opposition. For example in his poem about Macolm X he celebrates the renunciation of racial hatred, and again in 'Words in the Mourning Time', he calls on us thus:
We must not be frightened nor cajoledAnd he also says 'I am tired today/of history, its patina'd cliches/of endless evil'. He seeks tranquility and love. I am writing too much, I ought to just say that Hayden wrote luminous verse and that I can't understand why more people don't read it. Perhaps his pessimism is too much. In 'The Mirages':
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction
police and threaten us.
And the mirages, theis something profoundly sad that rings true, echoed in 'Traveling through Fog': 'the cloudy dark/ensphering us seems all we can/be certain of. Is Plato's cave', but also too harsh for me, because we put meaning into our paths by walking them, mirage led or no, (and there is nothing outside the cave for the wise old White man to bring back down to us. Their claims are lies.)
mirages -
I knew what they were
yet often
changed my course
and followed them.
Less lonely, less
lonely then,
the stranger said
Perhaps this 'pessimism' is best exemplified by Hayden's gently mocking poem 'Astronauts', in which he asks 'What is it we wish them/to find for us, as/we watch them on our screens?' Part of this scepticism may come from the amusement of a religious man with the childlike excitement of science setting out to find meaning far from the quotidian. Part of it may come from frustration with the White man's untroubled sense of himself as all humanity. In any case, his questions send us into ourselves for answers
January 5, 2019
This review focuses specifically on Hayden's first collection: A Ballad of Remembrance (which for some weird reason isn't listed on its own on GoodReads).
Ballad is as good a book of American poetry as there is. Period, no hyperbole. When I first read it, I focused on the towering epics of African American experience: "Middle Passage," "Runagate Runagate," and "Frederick Douglass," with its admonition to approach freedom not as a rhetorical emptiness, but as something lived as deeply, and for as long, as needed. Over the years, I've broadened my appreciation to include the psychic/mythic explorations of "The Diver" and the deep blues of "Homage to the Empress of the Blues," "Night Death, Mississippi," and "Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday." All of those stand up as well as ever.
But on this reading, I was deeply affected by the psychological and spiritual lyricism of the title poem--a nightmare vision of Mardi Gras that echoes against the sexual complications of "Witch Doctor"--and the autobiographical honesty of "Those Winter Sundays, "The Web" and "The Wheel." It's impossible to do justice to Hayden with an excerpt but, because it's been haunting me, I'll offer up the last several stanzas of "The Web" in which Hayden, echoing the spider poems of Whitman, Frost and dozens of others, descends into
"Embittered thoughts
of a web
more intricate,
More fragile--and
the stronger for
its fragilenes.
Its iron gossamer
withstands the blows
that would destroy.
Caught in that filmy
trap, wo shall
contrive escape?"
Ballad is as good a book of American poetry as there is. Period, no hyperbole. When I first read it, I focused on the towering epics of African American experience: "Middle Passage," "Runagate Runagate," and "Frederick Douglass," with its admonition to approach freedom not as a rhetorical emptiness, but as something lived as deeply, and for as long, as needed. Over the years, I've broadened my appreciation to include the psychic/mythic explorations of "The Diver" and the deep blues of "Homage to the Empress of the Blues," "Night Death, Mississippi," and "Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday." All of those stand up as well as ever.
But on this reading, I was deeply affected by the psychological and spiritual lyricism of the title poem--a nightmare vision of Mardi Gras that echoes against the sexual complications of "Witch Doctor"--and the autobiographical honesty of "Those Winter Sundays, "The Web" and "The Wheel." It's impossible to do justice to Hayden with an excerpt but, because it's been haunting me, I'll offer up the last several stanzas of "The Web" in which Hayden, echoing the spider poems of Whitman, Frost and dozens of others, descends into
"Embittered thoughts
of a web
more intricate,
More fragile--and
the stronger for
its fragilenes.
Its iron gossamer
withstands the blows
that would destroy.
Caught in that filmy
trap, wo shall
contrive escape?"
May 13, 2015
Discovering Robert Hayden's poetry has been a wonderful pleasure. This collection omits all or most of his first three books of poems (1940, 1948, and 1955), drawing from his middle and later books (1962 through his death in 1980). It's a slim book of roughly 90 poems, but their stylistic range is spectacular. Many of the poems (though not all) address themes of race, oppression, history, and identity. Many from the middle period poems are resolutely literary - not only are some of the words Hayden uses obscure, but the poems are packed with allusions to classical mythology, Biblical stories, and touchstones of western civilization generally. In his later poems, Hayden more often relaxes into spare or minimalist compositions, or into colloquial speech, or even stream-of-consciousness. A critical afterword by Arnold Rampersad remarks on the omnipresence of violence in Hayden's poetry; but at the same time, many of the poems present empathy or compassion as our best hope to balance and contain violence.
Some favorite poems from this collection include: Electrical Storm; Those Winter Sundays ("What did I know, what did I know/ of love's austere and lonely offices?"); Middle Passage; Runagate Runagate; October; and Ice Storm.
Some favorite poems from this collection include: Electrical Storm; Those Winter Sundays ("What did I know, what did I know/ of love's austere and lonely offices?"); Middle Passage; Runagate Runagate; October; and Ice Storm.
March 28, 2020
These are beautiful and empathy-rich poems by Hayden, the first African-American Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the position which would later become the Poet Laureate of the United States). As the introduction by Arnold Rampersad notes, Hayden’s Baha’i faith is on display here, but it’s also striking how deeply he sees and understands the human beings he writes about, even as they display terrible characteristics. In perhaps no other poem is this as much on display as in “[American Journal],” in which an alien observes Americans:
confess i am curiously drawn unmentionable to
the americans doubt i could exist among them for
long however psychic demands far too severe
much violence much that repels i am attracted
none the less their variousness their ingenuity
their elan vital and that some thing essence
quiddity i cannot penetrate or name
Whether he’s telling the story of an African American hero, like Frederick Douglass, or looking inward, to an average person’s fears and dreams, Hayden writes amazing poems that are well worth reading.
confess i am curiously drawn unmentionable to
the americans doubt i could exist among them for
long however psychic demands far too severe
much violence much that repels i am attracted
none the less their variousness their ingenuity
their elan vital and that some thing essence
quiddity i cannot penetrate or name
Whether he’s telling the story of an African American hero, like Frederick Douglass, or looking inward, to an average person’s fears and dreams, Hayden writes amazing poems that are well worth reading.
October 15, 2020
Much of my personal reading recently has been of poetry I have owned for too long and neglected. I bought Robert Hayden's collected poetry for a grad course in African American poetry, and though a number of his poems are in the modern canon, I had never read this entire collection. Hayden had some great poems you will not find online. Such much of what he said in his lifetime--he passed in 1980--retains its timeliness. Try his "Middle Passage" (with audio) for a sample: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...
June 12, 2012
I'm impressed how many different voices I hear in these lines-how much the balance shifts between colloquial and high diction, like when a slave in the middle passage speaks through the rhythms of Ariel's songs from The Tempest.
June 8, 2025
October—
its plangency,
its glow as of words in
the poet’s mind,
as of God in
the saint’s.
magnificent, regal, revelatory poems, with both wisdom:
We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction
police and threaten us.
and pure:
What will you have? she inquired, the sallow vendeuse
of prepared tarnishes and jokes of nacre and ormolu,
what but those gleamings, oldrose graces,
manners like scented gloves? Contrived ghosts
rapped to metronome clack of lavalieres.
joyous:
Turkeys like feather-
duster flowers
lie trussed in bunchy smother.
LANGUAGE!
The waves roar in and break
roar in and break
with granite spreeing hiss
on bronzegreen rocks below
and glistering upfling of spray.
May 4, 2023
Amazingly intelligent and thought-provoking collection of poetry on a wide range of topics and issues. Black history, Religion, Mythology, Family, Philosophy, Snow.. You name it.
Some of my favorites include:
Middle Passage
Those Winter Sundays
Words in the Mourning Time
Monet’s “Waterlilies”
A letter from Phillis Wheatley
Elegies for Paradise Valley
“As My Blood Was Drawn”
Bone-Flower Elegy
Also, Excerpts from, “[American Journal]”
“a divided people seeking reassurance from a past few understand and many scorn”
“america— as much a problem in metaphysics as
it is a nation earthly entity an iota in our
galaxy— an organism that changes even as i
examine it— fact and fantasy never twice the
same— so many variables”
(em dash used in place of double space in the original text, Goodreads “corrects” that)
Some of my favorites include:
Middle Passage
Those Winter Sundays
Words in the Mourning Time
Monet’s “Waterlilies”
A letter from Phillis Wheatley
Elegies for Paradise Valley
“As My Blood Was Drawn”
Bone-Flower Elegy
Also, Excerpts from, “[American Journal]”
“a divided people seeking reassurance from a past few understand and many scorn”
“america— as much a problem in metaphysics as
it is a nation earthly entity an iota in our
galaxy— an organism that changes even as i
examine it— fact and fantasy never twice the
same— so many variables”
(em dash used in place of double space in the original text, Goodreads “corrects” that)
December 21, 2021
An astonishing collection here. This took me quite a while, but the more I read poetry the more I realize I don’t understand poets. Wow! Their craft is so much more crafty than prose crafters...Hayden’s work is astounding. I think my absolute favorite is “The Diver” but good lord why would anyone lean into a favorite when there is this collection. The afterward is very enlightening too to his life. Highly recommend!!!
July 6, 2022
It feels odd to rate such an incredible work of art with three little stars. I felt too dumb to understand half of this book without googling a phrase or word every few poems, so I was sort of stressed out reading it because it wasn't *easy* to read. But that's a user problem. What a fascinating collection.
July 11, 2025
Could not be more timely:
“confess i am curiously drawn unmentionable to
the americans doubt i could exist among them for
long however psychic demands far too severe
much violence much that repels i am attracted
none the less their variousness their ingenuity
their elan vital and that some thing essence
quiddity i cannot penetrate or name”
“confess i am curiously drawn unmentionable to
the americans doubt i could exist among them for
long however psychic demands far too severe
much violence much that repels i am attracted
none the less their variousness their ingenuity
their elan vital and that some thing essence
quiddity i cannot penetrate or name”
November 26, 2025
Absolutely beautiful stunning work. Hayden is not well known, and I only know him now because of college. I've had to write a lot about his work, and am still to do a final paper for my class, and still feel like I'm learning from his words. I read this cover to cover, but also probably more than that because I reread a lot of the poems separately.
October 4, 2024
read for Twentieth Century and Contemporary African American Poetry class
April 1, 2022
Reading this was an experience. I think Hayden is now one of my all-timers.
There were amazing pieces throughout, although I think the first collection included had most of my favorites. The way he included and blended different voices and perspectives were just incredible.
His later work went away from that polyphonic style, but didn’t lose its power.
We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as a deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstractions
police and threaten us.
There were amazing pieces throughout, although I think the first collection included had most of my favorites. The way he included and blended different voices and perspectives were just incredible.
His later work went away from that polyphonic style, but didn’t lose its power.
We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as a deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstractions
police and threaten us.
August 2, 2007
These poems are a bit uneven, but the ones that are good are fantastic. "A Plague of Starlings" and "Night-Blooming Cereus" are especially good, and worth checking out even if you're not much of a poetry person.
August 11, 2021
A great variety of form and perspective on history, black experience in the US and the way people live. I liked a lot his poem letter from Phylis Wheatley surprisingly connected to Blake's The Chimney Sweeper
September 14, 2022
For Read Harder Challenge #12, Read an entire poetry collection.
Precise writing, hopeful and moving. I had a poetry class with Professor Hayden in college, but didn’t fully appreciate then how accomplished he was.
Precise writing, hopeful and moving. I had a poetry class with Professor Hayden in college, but didn’t fully appreciate then how accomplished he was.
November 24, 2020
I did not know Robert Hayden’s name until I read Between The World and Me five years ago and did not read his work until I re-read Mr. Coates’ book recently. Some absolutely ravishing work.
March 12, 2022
i love poetry. Hayden shattered me. i will be reading much much more.
November 13, 2022
Poetry
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February 24, 2019I chose this poetry book over the others waiting forlornly on my shelves on the strength of a single poem, "Those Winter Sundays," which I find starkly and deeply moving. I found much else that I liked in Hayden's Collected Poems, but nothing to equal that poem. This may be because the impact of poetry can deepen with time and re-reading. In a year or two, I might grow equally fond of another poem from this volume.
I note that I found Reginald Dwayne Betts's introduction powerful, and Arnold Rampersad's afterword both informative and helpful. Robert Hayden, 1913-1980, was an important American poet, who tackled themes of racism and slavery, especially in the context of American history. This collection includes many such poems, of which, this afternoon, my favorite is "Frederick Douglass." Again, my opinion may shift over time. Another poem I particularly liked was 'Monet's "Waterlilies,"' which touches on both America's race struggles and Vietnam in its opening lines ("Today as the news from Selma and Saigon//poisons the air like fallout"), but focuses on the transcendent quality of art.
Hayden employs classical allusions and an extensive vocabulary, yet remains mostly accessible. Occasionally, his work is outright fantasy, such as the poem "Perseus," about the mythic hero who slew Medusa, a short yet hugely effective poem. The final poem in the collection, [American Journal], adopts the conceits of science fiction, using an alien's viewpoint to comment on America.
Two other poems that I especially liked were "Approximations," composed of four haiku-esque parts, which, like haiku, conjured more than they contained, and "Astronauts," which resonated partly because of my own fascination with the subject, and partly because of the unanticipated trajectory of the poem, which closes "Why are we troubled?//What do we ask of these men?//What do we ask of ourselves?"
I recommend the collection as a whole, and, for those too busy to read the whole book, I recommend seeking out "Those Winter Sundays."
I note that I found Reginald Dwayne Betts's introduction powerful, and Arnold Rampersad's afterword both informative and helpful. Robert Hayden, 1913-1980, was an important American poet, who tackled themes of racism and slavery, especially in the context of American history. This collection includes many such poems, of which, this afternoon, my favorite is "Frederick Douglass." Again, my opinion may shift over time. Another poem I particularly liked was 'Monet's "Waterlilies,"' which touches on both America's race struggles and Vietnam in its opening lines ("Today as the news from Selma and Saigon//poisons the air like fallout"), but focuses on the transcendent quality of art.
Hayden employs classical allusions and an extensive vocabulary, yet remains mostly accessible. Occasionally, his work is outright fantasy, such as the poem "Perseus," about the mythic hero who slew Medusa, a short yet hugely effective poem. The final poem in the collection, [American Journal], adopts the conceits of science fiction, using an alien's viewpoint to comment on America.
Two other poems that I especially liked were "Approximations," composed of four haiku-esque parts, which, like haiku, conjured more than they contained, and "Astronauts," which resonated partly because of my own fascination with the subject, and partly because of the unanticipated trajectory of the poem, which closes "Why are we troubled?//What do we ask of these men?//What do we ask of ourselves?"
I recommend the collection as a whole, and, for those too busy to read the whole book, I recommend seeking out "Those Winter Sundays."
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December 27, 2022When I was gathering poems for Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009), this collection was one of my guides, and I still return to it regularly. Robert Hayden’s eye for the complicated realities of our intertangled world is always astonishingly fresh. There’s “A Plague of Starlings,” in which the birds, black and gorgeous though they are, slick the walkways of a historically black college and university campus with their droppings so that workmen seek to destroy the flocks and bystanders are forced to confront the “troublesome” creatures left alive, as well as the bodies of those that have been killed. The scenario sounds wholly gruesome but, touched by Hayden’s hand and ear, the poem sings. Another poem compares the mind of the poet to trees burdened and broken by a December ice storm. There’s the speaker who witnesses the varied lives that thrive among the wreckage of our world. In a poem that observes a child’s brutal punishment, there are elephant ears and zinnias and a consoling tree. Even the nearly uncomplicated awe the speaker experiences while witnessing a cactus bloom is resonant with the weight of time and place and impermanence and culture. I couldn’t collect all the environmentally charged Hayden poems in Black Nature because there are so many gorgeous ones. Robert Hayden is a poet I turn to when I want to read sheer beauty that doesn’t shrug off the realities of nearly every interaction in the world. Though I depend on my dog-eared copy of the 1995 edition (W. W. Norton), a newer edition of Hayden’s Collected (Liveright, 2013) has an introduction by current New York Times Magazine poetry editor, Reginald Dwayne Betts. If you don’t know the work of Robert Hayden, or haven’t read it in a while, I urge you to get your hands on one of these books as soon as you can.
Review published originally with Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/2021/07/thi...
Review published originally with Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/2021/07/thi...
February 17, 2022
I have brushed up against Robert Hayden often in my literary travels but have never taken the sort of deep-dive that a volume like this affords until now, and I am so glad that I did. What leaps off the page first and foremost, from poem to poem, is Hayden's love of language--these are poems that are simply stuffed with words both common and archaic, as the if the speaker is desperate to communicate what he is thinking/feeling/viewing/experiencing and will use every tool in his toolbox to do so. Also impressive is Hayden's sense of place, his ability to bring different places--Detroit back-alley, Caribbean beaches, New Orleans jazz clubs--to vivid life.
The issue of race and the legacy of slavery haunts many of the poems here, none more so that the incredible "Middle Passage" as well the poems centering around figures such as Nat Turner, Bessie Smith, Malcolm X, and Frederick Douglass. What is clear in each of the incidents is that Hayden is building memorials of sort, planting a record of black voices and lives within a Western poetic tradition that rarely made (makes?) room for them.
The issue of race and the legacy of slavery haunts many of the poems here, none more so that the incredible "Middle Passage" as well the poems centering around figures such as Nat Turner, Bessie Smith, Malcolm X, and Frederick Douglass. What is clear in each of the incidents is that Hayden is building memorials of sort, planting a record of black voices and lives within a Western poetic tradition that rarely made (makes?) room for them.
July 30, 2018
This is my first exposure to Robert Hayden (1913-1980), a former Poet Laureate of the United States.
His poems ain’t half bad.
Hayden makes a free gift of his passion. He qualifies as a poet groping for the light in the dark.
For my taste, his poetry is rampant—he lets his energy run loose in too many directions. Some of the subject matter is raw. The narrative sprawls in too many of Hayden’s poems. There’s too much itinerary for my taste. Take a look at “Tour 5.”
Maybe I’ll try reading Robert Hayden again some time.
Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com
His poems ain’t half bad.
Hayden makes a free gift of his passion. He qualifies as a poet groping for the light in the dark.
For my taste, his poetry is rampant—he lets his energy run loose in too many directions. Some of the subject matter is raw. The narrative sprawls in too many of Hayden’s poems. There’s too much itinerary for my taste. Take a look at “Tour 5.”
Maybe I’ll try reading Robert Hayden again some time.
Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com
September 11, 2018
If you know Hayden at all, you probably know "Those Winter Sundays," and you should, because it's a hauntingly excellent poem. You may also know "Middle Passage," and if you don't, you probably should, for precisely the same reason. And if you read those two and love them the way you ought to, you might end up reading this book. And if you do, you will read many poems that should be much better known.
PEOPLE WHO LOVE POETRY YOU SHOULD LOVE ROBERT HAYDEN
that's more or less what I'm saying here
PEOPLE WHO LOVE POETRY YOU SHOULD LOVE ROBERT HAYDEN
that's more or less what I'm saying here
February 3, 2023
“Yeats’ highly sophisticated response to Irish history and culture, with all this controversies and passions, showed Hayden that a poet could become saturated in nationalistic lore and love, and still maintain independence of vision. He once declared that he sought to be a black poet “the way Yeats is an Irish poet.”
favorites/revisit: the wheel
the diver
theme and variation
fredrick douglas
soledad
locus
the ballad of sue ellen westerfield
kodachromes of the island
mourning times
favorites/revisit: the wheel
the diver
theme and variation
fredrick douglas
soledad
locus
the ballad of sue ellen westerfield
kodachromes of the island
mourning times
July 4, 2025
This collection of pieces large and medium sized by Hayden and interviews he had done came to me at an important time. I love this collection. It is wise and thoughtful and gave me an even deeper appreciation for a poet I have long admired, but now admire more. I really like these. His pathway to poetry, his talking about his individual poems, gives a lot of light to my little life. It is evocative in a time that seems to be a time for so many people of the country burning down. Maybe, as reflected in his poetry, it is simply the next logical step in the story.
September 6, 2020
Of the three Haydens that emerge from reading his collected works—the poet of private existence, the cosmic Baháʼí poet, and the history poet—it's the last of these that most contests his lingering reputation as a tweedy moderate encountered in anthologies: fervid, quietly modernist, polyvocal, archive-minded, and unlike any other account of America.
July 26, 2021
There were a few poems of Hayden’s that I just didn’t get at all, some more that I was obviously missing references to comprehend fully, but many more that were right up my alley as a history guy. I really enjoyed his biographical poems and although I know the first and last of anything tend to be the most memorable, I really loved the final poem: [American Journal].
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