494 Making It New: 1900–1945(1898–1966) and Robert Hayden (1913–1980). Tolson, whose first significant poem,
“Dark Symphony,” was published in 1939 and first collection, Rendezvous with
America, appeared in 1944, certainly identified himself as “a black poet,” with an
equal emphasis on both those terms. He wrote of Africa (Libretto for the Republic of
Liberia (1953)) and absorbed some of the bluesy, oral quality of African-American
storytelling. However, “as a black poet,” Tolson insisted, he had absorbed the “Great
Ideas of the Great White World” and had roots “in Africa, Europe, and America.”
And as poet, it is clear, he came under the spell, the almost exclusive determination,
first of Whitman and then of writers like Eliot and Tate. The result of that spell, or
debt, and the polyglot sense of his own identity, was poems like Harlem Gallery:
Book 1, The Curator (1965). Designed as the first in a series of five volumes
representing stages in the African-American diaspora, Harlem Gallery is unmistakably
Eliotic: a dense, intricate exercise in literary allusion and cultural reference,
linguistically precise, stylistically complex. In a preface to this long, epic poem,
another, white poet Karl Shapiro claims that Tolson “writes and thinks in Negro.”
But other, black writers, associated with the Black Aesthetic movement, were surely
closer to the mark – if unfair about his motives – when they accused him of writing
just for a white audience. In Harlem Gallery, the other four books of which were
never completed, Hayden writes and thinks in a modernist vein that remains, for the
most part, racially uninflected. This is a poem about Harlem, not of it.
Robert Hayden claimed, in a manner similar to Cullen then later Tolson, that he
was “opposed to the chauvinistic and doctrinaire.” He saw “no reason why a Negro
poet should be limited to ‘racial utterance,’ ” he said, or why his writing should be
“judged by standards different from those applied to the work of other poets.”
However, like Cullen and Tolson again, that did not stop him from exploring racial
themes. “The Black Spear,” for example, written in 1942 and published in part in
Selected Poems (1966), is a memorable attempt to explore the African-American
presence in American history. Writing in response to the invitation in John Brown’s
Body (1928) by Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) for a black writer to produce the
seminal “black epic,” Hayden used material he had unearthed while working for the
Federal Writers’ Project here to produce a montage of visions and voices. Despite
that, Hayden was essentially a traditional poet, uninclined to reinvent black traditions
or rehearse the particularities of black life. As his Collected Poems (1985) shows, his
work – published over forty years, beginning with Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940) –
is written mostly in formal meters. Even when he uses free verse, it is a free verse that
is markedly iambic. And his subjects include the perennial ones of personal memory
(“Those Winter Sundays”) and the conflict between the impulses toward life and
death (“The Swimmer”). He can, certainly, dramatize the sufferings of black people
with clarity and power (“Night. Death. Mississippi”) and their “dream of the
beautiful, needful thing – known as freedom” (“Frederick Douglass”). But, even
here, he is not slow to relate “the news from Selma to Saigon,” or to see a connection
between the black victims of American history and the victims of history generally,
of whatever complexion. “From the corpse woodpiles, from the ashes / and staring
pits of Dachau, / Buchenwald they come –” he says, in “From the Corpse Woodpiles,GGray_c04.indd 494ray_c 04 .indd 494 8 8/1/2011 7:54:05 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 05 AM