Collected Poems 1st edition by Hayden, Robert (2013) Paperback

by Robert Hayden

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

About the author

Robert 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.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Auden had already repudiated his own earlier commitment to radical socialism, and Hayden now began to do the same. Increasingly he distanced himself from African-American cultural nationalism, with which he had been struggling as a force for some time, as Countee Cullen had struggled before him. Seeing Marxism and ultranationalism as, in different ways, inimical to the flourishing of art, Auden proposed a modernist poetry of technical and meditative complexity, in which judicious erudition and imagination, rather than pseudo-folk simplicity or didacticism, were vital elements. He encouraged in Hayden an appreciation of the work of British poets such as Hopkins, Hardy, and Yeats, as well as that of genuine contemporaries such as Spender. W.B. Yeats's highly sophisticated response to Irish history and culture, with all its 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."

from Arnold Rampersad's Afterword

Hayden, as a man and as a poet, held no stock in naming games. He was a poet who would not demean his art for identity politics of any kind. Throughout his life, he resisted the categories invented to both limit and define what a writer could discuss because, ultimately there are no multitudes in pigeonholes. In an unpublished interview Hayden writes, "I have said many, many times no place is home. Therefore, in a sense because I don't have a home anywhere, in a sense everyplace is home." This, far from being about rejecting humanity, is an openness that allows one to love and engage with the world in a way the displaced know best. This idea of being an exile, and the gifts it brings, seems a little-explored aspect of Hayden's work.

from Reginald Dwayne Betts Remembering Hayden

For a forty year retrospective collection of poetry, the Collected Poems of Robert Hayden is rather thin. Granted, Hayden was a stickler for continuing to tinker with his verse; he did not like re-publishing work he came later to believe was inferior in craft or content. He did not wish certain verse he calls "prentice poems" to be placed within this collection--and the editors honored his request. Hence, his first published collection is not included here as well as some subsequent published poems which Hayden believed should be buried in a desk drawer and forgotten. Certainly this culling concentrates the good, but we do not have an opportunity to see what Hayden dismisses as inferior.

Hayden is a bit like Yeats, a bit like Bishop, a bit like Auden, a bit like Cullen--but poring through this collection I came to appreciate that Hayden is a lot like Hayden: He's an excellent craftsman and has an interesting perspective on world events and history. He incorporates African-American history, Baha'i religion, and beautiful, profound descriptions of the natural world. Hayden is definitely unique, definitely worth reading. This thin collection is the best way to dive in.