rank of contemporary American poets. The
same history for which he had such a great
respect will in time return that respect in full
measure.
When I suggested that Hayden was an out-
sider from the start, I was not exaggerating. Born
Asa Sheffey Bundy (and named after his father),
Hayden as an infant was left in the care of neigh-
bors by his natural parents, while they went their
respective ways in search of separate lives and
livelihoods. Ruth Bundy expected to return for
her son, but as those early years passed, William
and Sue Ellen Hayden raised the boy as their own,
giving him their name, along with almost equal
portions of love and guilt. His foster mother never
let the boy forget her charity, his ingratitude, and
his natural mother’s unworthiness. His foster
father devoted his hard-shell Baptist morality
toward an upright raising of his son; Hayden
thus oscillated among love, gratitude, recrimina-
tion, guilt, and downright emotional confusion.
His natural mother’s return to the old Detroit
neighborhood during his early adolescence did
not simplify matters.
Some of Hayden’s most widely anthologized
work indirectly and artistically reflects these child-
hoodcircumstancesandambivalences.‘‘TheWhip-
ping’’ recalls the stress of psychic punishment
associated with ordinary discipline, and while the
poet distances the actual experience (if indeed the
poem does grow out of a real event) with careful
combinations of point of view, tone, and symbol,
the final appeal of the poem is its universality.
Hayden thus reminds us all of the love-hate
dynamic which both bonds and repels parent and
child, as he recalls such emotional trauma:
His tears are rainy weather to woundlike
memories:
My head gripped in bony vise of knees, the
writhing struggleto wrench free, the blows, the fear worse than
blows that hateful
Words could bring, the face that I no longer
knew or loved....
Well, it is over now, it is over, and the boy
sobs in his room,
And the woman leans muttering against a
tree, exhausted, purged—
avenged in part for lifelong hidings she has
had to bear.
He treats his foster father more gently in
‘‘Those Winter Sundays,’’ but the regret for lost
opportunity to express love resides within this
poem as well. Hayden phrases the unappreciated
devotion of his foster father as ‘‘love’s austere
offices,’’ thereby implicitly characterizing even the
warmth of familial love in terms of cold silence:
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
And slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
(Collected Poems)
The writing of such poems did not come easily
to the artist; he often suggested the need to achieve
what he called ‘‘psychic distance,’’ a form of objec-
tifying through carefullycrafted poetic art. That
need seemed almost to haunt him, as if he could
put his past in perspective only by expressing its
joy and pain in verse, but rarely did he indulge in
confessional lyric unguarded or unannealed with
the truth of art. For example, when he was in his
forties and planning a trip abroad, in the process
of getting a passport, he sent to Lansing for a copy
of his birth certificate,using the name of Robert
Hayden,sincehehadbeentoldbyhisfoster
parents that they had adopted him as an infant.
He discovered that he did not exist as Robert
Hayden, that he had never been adopted, and
that he had, in effect, lived his life under an
assumed name. Not surprisingly, his mid-career
poem ‘‘Names’’ expresses the psychic trauma asso-
ciated with this realization:
When my fourth decade came,
I learned my name was not my name.
I felt deserted, mocked.
Why had the old ones lied?
No matter. They were dead.WHATEVER EMOTIONAL PRICE IT COSTHIM TO LIVE THE ROLE OF THE OUTSIDER, THAT
PAYMENT HAS AFFORDED HIS READERS AN
INSIDER’S VIEW OF THEMSELVES AND THEIR
CULTURE.’’
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