Poetry About Life

ROBERT HAYDEN

(The First African-American Poet Laureate)

(1913-1980)

Robert Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey on August 4, 1913. His parents, Asa and Sheffy, had separated before his birth. Unable to raise him, his mother gave him over to foster parents named William and Sue Ellen hayden; because the Haydens lived next door, she was able to visit her son frequently throughout his childhood. Hayden would later remember these visits from his mother as the most edifying and enjoyable moments of his upbringing, for the relations with his adoptive family were quite strained. After completing high school, Hayden entered Detroit City College on a scholarship allegedly obtained with the assistance of a woman who had seen him reading a book of Countee Cullen's poetry while standing in a welfare line. However, even with the scholarship, the costs of college proved too much for Hayden and he was forced to drop out in 1936, one credit short of graduation. Having already published a few poems in various literary magazine, Hayden was able to get a job with the Work Progress Administration researching black history and culture, especially the abolition movement and the Underground Railroad. Much of this research would inform his later poetry.

In June 1940, Hayden married Erma Inez Morris, a music teacher and concert pianist, and published his first volume of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust. Published locally, it received only minimal attention from the literary community, and Hayden himself would later criticize the volume. Hayden enrolled in the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to pursue graduate studies in 1942, the same year that poet W. H. Auden began teaching there. Auden would become an enormous influence on Hayden's poetry from that time on. After serving as a teaching assistant for two years, Hayden was able to obtain a professorship at Fisk University in 1946. Hayden continued to write poetry and publish volumes throughout the 1940s and '50s, but they were never very widely distributed and he continued to go largely unnoticed. It was not until the 1960s that his literary reputation began to take root, and in 1966, it blossomed: Hayden received the Grand Prix de la Po�sie at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Senegal for his volume A Ballad of Remembrance. That same year, he was appointed Senegal's Poet Laureate. Now with an international audience, Hayden republished

a selection of his best work from the last several decades. His Selected Poems (1966) brought him instant acclaim as a poet of rare artistry�and as one of the leading African-American poets of the day. The most trenchant criticism of his poetry, however, came from within the black literary community itself, as politically motivated poets concerned Hayden for not taking a more vociferous stance on racial issues in his work.

Despite this condemnation, Hayden's reputation reached new proportions in the 1970s. In 1975, he was elected to the Academy of American Poets and, in that same year, he was appointed Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress (later renamed Poet Laureate), becoming the first African-American ever to hold that position. He continued to teach and to publish poems, many of them his best, until his death in Ann Arbor in 1980. Although he did live to receive the kind of respect as a poet that he sought throughout his career, he is only now beginning to receive widespread recognition as one of his generation's greatest practitioners of the art of poetry.

Those Winter Sundays