Robert Hayden

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Robert Hayden (August 4, 1913 – February 25, 1980) was an American poet, essayist, and educator.

He served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1976 to 1978, a role today known as US Poet Laureate.

He was the first African-American writer to hold the office.

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Career

Hayden's theory of poetry and how to communicate to a black audience were settled by the 1960s and the emergence of the Black Arts Movement, when a more youthful generation of African-American artists wrote politically and emotionally charged protest poetry overwhelmingly aligned to a black audience. A few scholars and analysts responded to his decision not to reinvent himself as shown by the 1960s photographs. Hayden maintained his belief in poetry as an artistic frame rather than a polemical protest, and he reiterated that poetry should, in addition to other aspects, refer to human characteristics, such as social injustice. Hayden's theories about the artist's relationship to his poems also contributed to his inability to write emotionally articulate protest sonnets. Hayden's tactic was to make a distinction between the speaker and the poem's movement.

As he does in the poem "Heart-Shape in the Dust," his poetry often addressed the suffering of African Americans, often using his former home of Paradise Valley slum as a backdrop. He made good use of black vernacular and folk speech, and he wrote political poetry as well as a sequence on the Vietnam War.

"I was trying to convey the sense that the horrors of the war became a sort of presence," he said, accompanied you in the most personal and intimate way, having your meals, and so on. The ferociousness, brutality, and criminality of war had affected everything. "I think this is one of the finest of the poems" I read.

Hayden's poetry, as well as his regular assertions that he ought to be seen as a "American poet" rather than a "black poet," prompted a lot of criticism of him as a "uncle Tom" in the 1960s. However, a significant number of his poems were about African-American history, contemporary black figures, including Malcolm X, and African-American cultures, particularly Hayden's native Paradise Valley.

The Grand Prize for Poetry was presented by unanimous vote at the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, on April 7, 1966. More than ten thousand people from thirty-seven countries attended the festival. However, Hayden was denounced at a Fisk University conference of black writers led by Melvin Tolson on April 22, 1966, for refusing to identify himself as a black poet.

Hayden is also known as a nature poet and is included in the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African Nature Poetry. One of his nature-based poems, "A Plague of Starlings," is one of his most popular poems. Hayden's "Night-Blooming Cereus" poem is another example of the natural world's representation. The poem is presented as a series of haiku-like stanzas. Hayden said he was inspired by a trip to Duluth, Minnesota, during the smelt fishing season. "[...]turned into a haiku, where you get it all by suggestion and implication," he explains.

Robert Hayden has been praised on several occasions for his writing of poems, the unique perspectives in his art, his precise words, and his complete command of classical poetic techniques and structures. Elinor Wylie, Countee Cullen, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, John Keats, W. H. Auden, and W. B. Yeats were among Hayden's influences.

In 1975, Hayden was elected to the American Academy of Poets. "Those Winter Sundays" is his most popular poem, which is about fatherly love and loneliness. It is one of the twentieth century's most anthologized American poems. He resigned as United States Poet Laureate from 1976-1977 during America's Bicentennial, and again in 1977-1978, although his health was failing at the time. Brown University (1976) and Fisk (1978) awarded him successive honorary degrees. In 1977, Keith Berwick was interviewed on television in Los Angeles by At One With You. Hayden was one of those invited to be honoured by President Jimmy Carter and his wife at a White House reception in January 1980 celebrating American poetry. He served for a decade as an editor of Bahá's journal World Order.

"The Whipping" (about a young boy being severely punished for an undetermined offence), "Middle Passage" (influenced by the events surrounding the United States versus The Amistad case), "Runagate, Runagate"), and "Frederick Douglass are among other notable poems.

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