In The Dispatch this morning, I take a look at the career of one of my favorite poets, Robert Hayden, who was denounced as an “Uncle Tom” in 1966 because he refused to write sloppy, race-baiting poetry. Excerpt:
The demand that he surrender his individuality also gave rise to one of his most intriguing poems, “The Diver,” which appeared the same year as the Fisk conference. In it, Hayden reflected on his ascent from the ghetto and the temptations and threats that had influenced his literary and religious life. The poem is narrated by a survivor of nitrogen narcosis, an intoxicating condition that causes scuba divers to experience tunnel vision and hallucinations. He describes how he visited a sunken ship, where he was surrounded by “snappers” and “gold groupers” before entering a shipwreck. There he witnessedthe sad slow
dance of gilded
chairs, the ectoplasmic
swirl of garments…
[the] livid gesturings,
eldritch hide and
seek of laughing faces.He briefly fantasized about “fling[ing] aside / [his] mask” in order to “yield to rapturous / whisperings,” but knowing this would be suicidal, he instead
strove against the
cancelling arms that
suddenly surrounded
me,and, escaping the seductive scene, “swam from / the ship somehow, / somehow began the / measured rise.”
“The Diver” lends itself to many interpretations, but among them is certainly his resistance to the pressure (apt word!) to conform to the political demands of the age—demands that would obliterate his hard-won artistic skill—even when radicals, as we say nowadays, threatened to “cancel” him.
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