Poetry for Students, Volume 31

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

American poet Robert Hayden was born on
August 4, 1913, in Detroit, Michigan, to Asa Shef-
fey and Ruth Flinn, an impoverished couple who
soon separated and moved away. The child, named
Asa Bundy, was left with neighbors, William and
Sue Ellen Hayden. The Haydens raised Asa as their
own son, naming him Robert Earl Hayden,
although they never formally adopted him, a fact
that Hayden did not discover until 1953, when he
applied for a passport. Growing up with extreme
nearsightedness meant that he did not participate
in school sports; instead he took to reading, and he
began to write poetry at ayoung age. By the age of
sixteen, when he was attending Northern High
School in Detroit, his ambition was to become a
poet. His first published poem appeared in 1931,
shortly after he graduated from high school. Hay-
den then attended Detroit City College (now
Wayne State University),leaving in 1936 and not
formally graduating until 1942. After college he
began work as a writer and researcher for the
Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Project
Administration. During this time he studied black
history, especially the Underground Railroad and

antislavery movement in Michigan. He wrote

scripts for a radio station and news stories for the

Negro Progress Exposition in Detroit in 1939. He

also wrote reviews of movies, plays, and music for

theMichigan Chronicle, a weekly newspaper read

by black people.

In 1940, Hayden published his first collection

of poems,Heart-Shape in the Dust. In the same

year he married Erma Inez Morris, a school-

teacher, and studied under W. H. Auden at the

University of Michigan, where he received a mas-

ter of arts degree in 1944. He became an assistant

professor at Fisk University, in Nashville, Ten-

nessee, in 1946, and remained there for twenty-

three years, rising to the rank of professor. In

1969, he became professor of English at the Uni-

versity of Michigan and remained in that position

until his death.

Hayden published many books of poetry,

establishing himself as one of the leading African

American poets of his time. From 1976 to 1978, he

was a consultant in poetry at the Library of Con-

gress, the first African American to hold this posi-

tion. His works includeFigure of Time: Poems

(1955),A Ballad of Remembrance(1962),Selected

Poems(1966), in which ‘‘Runagate Runagate’’

appeared in its final version (the first version hav-

ing appeared inThe Poetry of the Negroin 1949),

Words in the Mourning Time(1970),The Night-

Blooming Cereus(1972),Angle of Ascent: New and

Selected Poems (1975), and American Journal,

published in a limited edition in 1978 and posthu-

mously in an enlarged edition in 1982. HisCol-

lected Poems, edited by Frederick Glaysher, was

published in 1985.

Hayden died of cancer on February 25, 1980,

in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the age of sixty-six.

POEM SUMMARY

Section I

‘‘Runagate Runagate’’ begins with a seven-line

unrhymed description of the flight of a runaway

black slave in the American South.Runagateis

an archaic form of the wordrunaway. The slave is

trying to escape from slavery in the South to

freedom in the North. The desperate nature of

his flight is conveyed, as he runs at night, in

darkness, through wooded terrain, unable to see

much of where he is going, and falling often. He is

pursued by men with dogs, tracking him down. It

is a cold night, and morning is a long way off.

Robert Hayden(ÓPach Brothers / Corbis)

Runagate Runagate