American black experience. He read American
history as a long, tortuous struggle in psychic
evolution, an exercise in humanity. An alien at
home, he nonetheless contended with America as
theplacewhere‘‘wemustgoonstrugglingtobe
human.’’ HisCollected Poemsshould become one
of our exemplary poetic texts....
Hayden’s Collected Poemsbrings together
work from nine books written over more than
forty years. His first volume,Heart-Shape in the
Dust, published in 1940, and his two pamphlets,
The Lion and the Archer(1948) andFigure of Time:
Poems(1955), are poorly represented here because
he came to feel they poorly represented him. He
considered his early poems ‘‘prentice pieces’’ and
only a limited number survived for publication in
his first mature volumes,A Ballad of Remembrance
(1962) andSelected Poems(1966). Hayden’s early
work dutifully followed the themes and forms of
the Harlem Renaissance and relied heavily on his
experience as a folklore researcher for the Detroit
branch of the Federal Writers’ Project in the late
1930s. As his work progressed, he began to shed
his first poetic models: Edna St. Vincent Millay,
Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes and, most impor-
tant, Countee Cullen. Slowly he developed a con-
sciously modernist style, a type of tersely written
symbolic lyric, often with an Afro-American inflec-
tion, that was all his own.
BythetimeofA Ballad of Remembrance,
which starts off the Collected Poems,Hayden
had already developed his characteristic style:
‘‘meditative, ironic, richly human,’’ as he wrote of
Mark Van Doren. He was a ‘‘romantic realist,’’ a
formal lyricist with a feeling for the baroque, a
symbolistpoetwhodistrusted external reality but
nonetheless felt compelled to grapple with history.
Like his mentor Auden, with whom he studied,
Hayden’s work is a little anthology of poetic
forms, though in general he favored two types
over others: the spare, well-chiseled, ‘‘objective’’
lyric and the long, fragmentary, collage-like his-
tory poem. Hayden was never prolific and his
Collected Poemsis not a long book—in addition
toA Ballad of Remembrance, it consists ofWords
in the Mourning Time,The Night-Blooming Cer-
eus,Angle of AscentandAmerican Journal.And
yet it has a profound and passionate scope. Every
one of its poems is meticulously crafted....
Freedom is the great subject of Hayden’s
work, his poetic touchstone. He considered the
need for freedom a constant beyond history—
‘‘the deep immortal human wish,/the timeless
will,’’ as he said in ‘‘Middle Passage’’—but under-
stood that the struggle for freedom takes place
inside history. In a number of long poems dealing
with nineteenth-century America (which he once
planned as a unified series to be calledThe Black
Spear) Hayden rediscovered and celebrated a
group of individual heroes, primarily blacks, who
ferociously opposed slavery: Sojourner Truth,
who ‘‘comes walking barefoot/out of slavery’’; Cin-
quez, who led the successful slave rebellion on the
Amistad; Harriet Tubman, who escaped from slav-
ery and then became one of the most spectacular
agents of the underground railroad, continually
making the hard journey from ‘‘Can’t to Can’’;
Nat Turner; John Brown;and, of course, Freder-
ick Douglass. Hayden’s characteristic method in
these poems is the collage, a form which works by
the ironic juxtaposition of different voices. In
‘‘Middle Passage,’’ for example, he mixes his own
descriptive commentary with the voices of slave
traders, hymn singers and even the dead. So, too,
he splices together and adapts descriptions from
journal entries, ships’ logs, depositions and the
eyewitness accounts of traders. These formal inno-
vations give his history poems an uncanny ethno-
graphic basis, a profound sense of the human
suffering caused by slavery.
Like Harriet Tubman, all Hayden’s heroes
‘‘Mean mean mean to be free,’’ and lead others
to freedom. Their legacy is the lives their lives
insure: the nameless slaves escaping to freedom
in ‘‘Runagate Runagate,’’ the ‘‘many lives’’ trans-
figured in ‘‘Middle Passage.’’ This idea is resound-
ingly expressed in Hayden’s sonnet to Frederick
Douglass.... Hayden’s fine rhetorical poem,
reminiscent of Hopkins’s sonnet ‘‘That Nature
Is a Heraclitean Fire,’’ asserts that what matters
is not freedom for the self alone but the commu-
nal realization of the dream. In this sense he is a
utopian poet.
Hayden’s historical and public poems are
counterbalanced by personal lyrics like ‘‘Homage
to the Empress of the Blues,’’ ‘‘Mourning Poem
for the Queen of Sunday,’’ ‘‘Summertime and the
Living... ,’’ ‘‘The Rabbi’’ and, my personal favor-
ites, ‘‘The Whipping’’ and ‘‘Those Winter Sun-
days.’’ Written at various times during his life,
these poems rely on childhood experiences in a
Detroit slum ironically known as Paradise Valley.
Hayden refused to sentimentalize his past—as a
child growing up his primary desire was to escape
the world that surrounded him, and he also deter-
mined to remember it accurately. He was bornRunagate Runagate