Asa Sheffey but raised as Robert Hayden (a dual-
ity that haunted him) and he knew both his nat-
ural and foster parents. He was bound to his
childhood as the foster son of poor working-
class people and remained committed to what he
liked to call ‘‘folk’’ people: poor, uneducated,
dignified, all those who quietly fulfilled ‘‘love’s
austere and lonely offices.’’
There is a certain detachment even in Hay-
den’s most personal lyrics, a slight distancing of
what he calls ‘‘the long warfare with self/with
God.’’ He once said that ‘‘Reticence has its
esthetic values, too,’’ and his typical method was
to exteriorize and objectify the past by speaking
about it in the third person, or by using the dis-
guise of a persona. In a sense he was like the diver
in the opening lyric of theCollected Poems: a man
who needed to keep control as he moved down
into the oceanic depths, who longed to fling aside
his mask and be done forever with the ‘‘vain
complexity’’ of the self but continually managed
to pull himself away from the silenced wreck and
re-commence ‘‘the measured rise.’’ There is a
muted but powerful longing for transcendence
in Hayden’s work, and the diver is close kin to
the figure of the old man with bloodstained wings
in ‘‘For a Young Artist,’’ who begins sprawled out
in a pigsty but ends by somehow managing to fly
again, ‘‘the angle of ascent/achieved.’’ Both the
diver and the old man are figures of the trium-
phant artist....
Source:Edward Hirsch, ‘‘Mean to Be Free,’’ inNation,
Vol. 241, No. 21, December 21, 1985, pp. 685–86.
John S. Wright
In the following excerpt, Wright traces the trajec-
tory of Hayden’s career and discusses the motiva-
tions and inspirations behind his work.
In one of the quieter moments in the
expanded edition of his last book,American Jour-
nal, Robert Hayden offers a rare, unmediated
comment on the trajectory of his life: ‘‘When my
fourth decade came, / I learned my name was not
my name. / I felt deserted, mocked... And the
name on the book was dead, / like the life my
mother fled, / like the life I might have known.’’
Other names, unwanted names—‘‘Four Eyes.
And worse’’—kept Hayden inside and isolated
as a boy, plying his abysmally poor eyesight
with books. So ‘‘Old Four Eyes fled / to safety
in the danger zones / Tom Swift and Kubla Khan
traversed.’’ That world of the artist’s imagination
seems to be a place of refuge but is in fact a
danger zone, Hayden later concluded, because
art is both cruel and mysterious. The cruelty of
art, he alleged, is that it mockingly outlasts those
who make it. The mystery of art he voiced in a
simple question: ‘‘Why does it mean so much that
it can determine one’s whole life, make a person
sacrifice everything for it, even drive one mad?’’
The mystery of his own art he was most
sanguine about, saw himself, in fact—in that
veiled, allusive way he usually treated the details
of his own biography—as a ‘‘mystery boy’’ look-
ing for kin. If Robert Earl Hayden had been a
confessional poet, he would probably have made
more capital out of a life rich with the dramatic
tension he wanted his poems to have. He would
have worked more pointedly the flamboyant
ironies of a World War I era boyhood in the
‘‘Paradise Valley’’ section of Black Detroit. He
would have exposed and explored how his work’s
almost ritual preoccupation with identity, with
names, and with ambiguous realities reflected
the bruising fact that ‘‘Robert Hayden’’ was his
adoptive, not his legal name and that discovering
what that ‘‘real’’ name was served as part of his
initiation into fuller manhood. If the confessional
mode had better fit him, he would have
chronicled also the ‘‘burdens of consciousness’’
that his dual commitment to human freedom
and artistic integrity made him bear; he would
have logged and jagged confrontation with the
Black Arts writers which ultimately turned his
long tenure at Fisk University into a trial of
words and which made him for a moment seem
a naysayer to blackness and so become one of a
younger generation’s many scapegoat kings.HAYDEN WAS SEEKING WAYS, ON HIS
OWN TERMS, TO MAKE THE TECHNIQUES
AND INNOVATIONS OF THE NEW POETRY
MOVEMENT OF THE TWENTIES AND THIRTIES HIS
OWN, TO BRINGALLTHE RESOURCES OF THE
ENGLISH LANGUAGE—CLASSICAL AND
VERNACULAR, POPULAR AND ACADEMIC—TO BEAR
ON THE ILLUMINATION OF AFRO-AMERICAN
EXPERIENCE.’’Runagate Runagate