But Hayden was not a confessional poet like
so many of his contemporaries because, as he
acknowledged he enteredhis own experiences so
completely that he had no creative energy left
afterward. He could admire the way that Anne
Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and
Michael Harper made poems out of devastating
personal experiences; but he countered, in his own
defense, that ‘‘reticence hasits aesthetic values
too.’’ And so, with words at least, he wore the
mask, and won in wearing it the detached control
and objectivity without which poetic marvels like
his most widely acclaimed poem, ‘‘Middle Pas-
sage,’’ would not have been possible. From the
apprentice work of his earliest book,Heart Shape
in the Dust(1940), to the closing lines ofAmerican
Journal, he pushed toward the mastery of materi-
als, outlook, and technique that would enable him
to strike through the masks reality wore. And so he
made himself, like Malcom X of his honorific
poem ‘‘El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz,’’ one of Ahab’s
Native Sons, though rejecting Ahab.
The continuities in the progressive unmask-
ings, which Robert Hayden described as his ‘‘slim
offerings over four decades,’’ are striking. His
absorption with the past, especially the black
past, provided one axis of subject and theme for
him—an absorption thatbrooked no lost Edens,
no nostalgia, but which transformed archetype
and artifact into a poetry of revelation. At the
same time, he was drawn more to the dramas of
human personality than to things or abstractions
or philosophical ideas. InAmerican Journal,asin
all his books, the places, landscapes, and localities
he re-creates so minutelylive primarily through his
heroic and what he called ‘‘baroque’’ people—
more often than not outsiders, pariahs, even los-
ers. As he revealed in an interview with John
O’Brien, Hayden thought of himself as a ‘‘symbol-
ist of a kind,’’ as a ‘‘realist who distrusts so-called
reality,’’ as a ‘‘romantic realist.’’ And he couched
his symbolist explorations of human suffering
and transcendence in a world-view permeated by
an omnipresent, though never obtrusive, ‘‘God-
consciousness.’’ Poetry, indeedallart,hefelt,was
‘‘ultimately religious in the broadest sense of the
term’’; if poets have any calling beyond fulfilling
the demands of their craft, he insisted, ‘‘it is to
affirm the humane, the universal, the potentially
divine in the human creature.’’
Hayden was explicit about his own motives
in a little book,How I Write, which he published
with Judson Philips and Lawson Carter in 1972:
‘‘I write poetry,’’ he said, because
I’m driven, impelled to make patterns of
words
in the special ways
that poetry demands. Maybe whatever it is
I’m trying to
communicate I can most truthfully express in
poems.IthinkIhave
other reasons, too. At best, though, I can
make only very
tentative statements, and they’re subject
to change without
notice. I suppose I could say, with fear of
contradicting myself
later, that writing poetry is one way I have of
coming to grips
with both inner and external realities. I also
think of my writing
as a form of prayer—a prayer for illumina-
tion, perfection.
But he wasn’t satisfied with any of this,
thought it sounded pompous, high-falutin’,
though he knew it was about as close as he
could come to an answer. The fuller answer, if
more oblique, is projected, of course, in the body
of his work. There Robert Hayden the time-
keeper, Robert Hayden the symbol-maker, Rob-
ert Hayden the believer, Robert Hayden the wres-
tler with language and form, all voice in concert
‘‘the deep immortal human wish’’ that man be
‘‘permitted to be man,’’ that injustice, suffering,
and violence must yield, along with the inability
to love on which they feed, what Hayden’s Bahai
prophet, Baha’u’llah, envisioned as the absolute,
inescapable necessity for recognizing the funda-
mental oneness of mankind.
Far from embodying any naive optimism or
sentimental religiosity, Hayden’s vision of the
human predicament and of human possibility
presents love as characteristically anagon, presents
God and nature as beneficences shrouding caprice
or indifference, presents our slow progress toward
the godlike in man as a scourging, scarifying jour-
ney through maze and madness. That ‘‘voyage
through death to life upon these shores’’ (which
his ‘‘Middle Passage’’ chronicles, for example) dis-
covers its metaphors for sin, sickness, and salva-
tion in the historic matrix of the Atlantic slave
trade and racial slavery. But the death wish, the
masks, the phantasms that lure the crew and cargo
of the slave shipAmistadfigure no less potently in
the timeless and seemingly antithetical ‘‘easefulRunagate Runagate