Cinquez its deathless primaveral image,
life that transfigures many lives.
Voyage through death
to life upon these shores. (172–77)Cinquez images the human drive for life that,
however perversely and contradictorily, the poem’s
characters exercise in refusing to recognize the Af-
ricans’ “human wish” and oppressing the Africans’
“timeless will.” Cinquez acts in concert with the
humanity the slave owners necessarily embody
yet deny in themselves and in others. Despite the
genocidal cruelty the poem evokes, Cinquez con-
stitutes an “image” of the human will that may
precipitate renewal and change. Repudiating T.
S. Eliot’s pessimism in “The Wasteland,” “Middle
Passage” joins Hart Crane’s The Bridge as a major
poetic statement concerning America’s past and
potential future.
In the 1940s Hayden also experimented to es-
tablish his own poetic voice and to shed Heart-
Shape in the Dust’s compulsory fixed rhyme and
meter. Hayden described these years as his “Ba-
roque period” (Fetrow, 18). Deploying esoteric
diction and surreal imagery, poems such as “A
Ballad of Remembrance” and “Homage to the
Empress of the Blues” require careful reading and
attention to nuance. Hayden gathered these poems
and others in The Lion and the Archer (1948), co-
authored by Myron O’Higgins and published as
the Counterpoise Series’s first volume. Hayden
and a few Fisk colleagues had established the
Counterpoise Series and distributed a manifesto
announcing its guiding principles. The manifesto
asserts the poet’s freedom to write unconstrained
by extrapoetic concerns and demands that critics
judge African-American and non–African-Amer-
ican poets by the same standards (Collected Prose,
41–42). Hayden’s Figure of Time (1955) was the
third Counterpoise volume.
Collecting new poems with Hayden’s best pre-
vious work, A BALLAD OF REMEMBRANCE appeared
in 1962. One poem, “Theme and Variation,” em-
ploys a favorite Hayden character, the outcast or
outsider, and captures Hayden’s exaltation of the
poetic imagination. The poem features a persona
called “the stranger” (4): “There is, there is, he said,
an immanence / that turns to curiosa all I know”
(13–14). The imagination discloses a sublime
“immanence” that, in evading conceptualization,
shows the world how our conceptions organize to
be an oddly pornographic (“curiosa”) spectacle.
This “immanence” subtly awakens a will to resis-
tance by changing that drearily alienated world’s
“light” to a “rainbow darkness / wherein God way-
lays us and empowers” (15–16).
A Ballad of Remembrance won the Grand Prize
for Poetry awarded by the First World Festival of
Negro Arts held in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966—the
same year Hayden’s Selected Poems was published.
But 1966 also saw the beginning of a polemic be-
tween Hayden and more militant writers of the
BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, who were concerned with
art as propaganda and political weapon and iden-
tified racial identity as the overriding concern of
the African-American poet. Describing poetry
as “the art of saying the impossible” (Hatcher,
37), Hayden insisted that authentic poetry is
universal.
Hayden’s Words in Mourning Time (1970) med-
itates on America’s imperial violence in Southeast
Asia and on the tragic assassinations of the 1960s.
“El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz” mourns MALCOLM X,
tracing his pilgrimage from a “false dawn of vi-
sion” disclosing “a racist Allah” to his final vision
of “Allah the raceless in whose blazing Oneness all
/ were one” (22, 24, 53–54). “Words in Mourning
Time” links the assassinations of MARTIN LUTHER
KING, JR., and Robert Kennedy to the cold hatred
implicit in America’s conduct of the Vietnam War
and concludes that “We must go on struggling to
be human” and to “renew the vision of / a human
world” (112, 115–116).
Hayden became more introspective in The
Night-Blooming Cereus (1972). While “The
Night-Blooming Cereus” celebrates itself as ex-
emplifying what the “focused / energy” of the po-
etic “will” can achieve, “The Peacock Room” and
“Traveling through Fog” contemplate poetry’s
human and cognitive limits (39–40), confirm-
ing Hayden’s belief that, in its universal appeal,
poetry is “the art of saying the impossible.”Hayden, Robert Earl 239