I wrote this piece for The Objective Standard this week, but they would not publish it, so I thought I’d share it with you here:
Robert Hayden didn’t like being called a black poet. It placed him, he said, “in a kind of literary ghetto where the standards applied to other writers are not likely to be applied.” He preferred to be thought of simply as an American poet.
He certainly was that. Indeed, few authors have produced more insightful and lovingly crafted poetry about American history and culture than he. Hayden—who served as poet laureate in the bicentennial year of 1976—belongs on every July 4 reading list.
Born in a Detroit slum in 1913, he discovered poetry as a child. A social worker who saw him reading Countee Cullen’s anthology Color while standing in a welfare line took it upon herself to get him a scholarship to Detroit City College, where he met important writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Later, studying at the University of Michigan, he met W. H. Auden, who become his most important literary influence.
Auden wrote highly intellectual poetry that emphasized precision and insight more than emotional confession. More importantly, he shunned the ideological obsessions of many of his contemporaries. While many mid-20th-century poets viewed themselves as spokesmen for political causes, especially Marxism, Auden thought they should aim at broader themes, and although he wrote political poetry, he never wrote propaganda. Hayden, too, came to shun narrow, political poetry, which he saw as having “negligible literary value . . . because it [is] more rhetorical and programmatic than imaginative.”
It cost Hayden much to take that position; black radicals of the 1960s labeled him an “Uncle Tom” for refusing to devote his writing exclusively to racial protest. Yet Hayden did write about race, and did so indignantly, understandingly, movingly, and even magnanimously. In “Middle Passage,” for instance, he articulates the experience of slaves chained in the bellies of dark ships. In “On Lookout Mountain,” he reflects on the eerie sense of history he feels at a picnic spot that was once a bloody Civil War battlefield:
A world away, yet nearer than our hope
or our belief, the scions of that fighting climb endless hills of war. . . .
Have done, have done.
And he wrote elegies for Malcom X, John Brown, and Frederick Douglass—this last being one of his finest works. In it, Hayden celebrates the legacy of liberty that the abolitionist strove to realize: “this man / shall be remembered . . . / with the lives grown out of his life, the lives / fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.”
Hayden also did write protest poetry, but instead of the off-putting confessional style in vogue in the Vietnam era, he focused primarily on producing good art. Among the “dubious assumptions” held by mid-20th-century writers, said Hayden, was “that the ability to ‘express oneself’ is more important than craftsmanship.” Writers of this persuasion were “hailed in some quarters as the ‘voices of revolution.’ But the truly revolutionary poets are those who are committed to some integrative vision of art and life.”
Hayden’s integrative vision was rooted both in love for America and an objectivity about its history and culture. In “Witch Doctor,” for example, he’s skeptical about the inner-city preacher resplendent in what we would today call “bling,” who lectures worshippers with “wildering vocables / hypnotic no-words planned (and never failing) / to enmesh his flock,” and who secretly considers himself God. On the other hand, he could celebrate even the meagre joys of his impoverished childhood, as in “‘Summertime and the Living,’” or in his most famous and most moving poem, “Those Winter Sundays.”
Exceptionally disciplined, Hayden obsessed over the sound and weight of his words—one reason his complete poems comprise fewer than two hundred pages—and strove to express meaningful and timeless truths. Calling himself a “romantic realist,” he insisted that “art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos,” and the order he found in American life lay in its striving—often violently or reluctantly—to realize the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
This becomes clear in “[American Journal],” published not long before his 1980 death, which imagines a space alien reporting back to the “Counselors” on his home planet about the Americans he’s secretly observed. The Counselors think Americans “a decadent people,” but “i / do not find them decadent.” There is “some thing essence / quiddity” about them that makes them special:
we are an ancient race and have outgrown illusions cherished here item their vaunted
liberty no body pushes me around i have heard
Them say land of the free they sing
Though the alien is too cynical to “exist among [Americans] for long,” he finds himself drawn to “their variousness their ingenuity / their elan vital.” America, he concludes, is “as much a problem in metaphysics as / it is a nation.” In poetry delicately and eloquently worded, Robert Hayden expressed the solution to that problem, by giving voice to the enduring spirit of independence at the heart of the American Dream.
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