high price of what would be a recurrent accusa-
tion: that he had abandoned his people and his
political commitments for a poetry of arcane,
overwrought diction and professorial pretension.
There is little doubt that Hayden’s develop-
ment as a poet has placed increasing demands on
his readers; and Hayden himself—unceasingly self-
critical—has acknowledged that he was inclined to
be ‘‘perhaps oversensitive to the weight and color
of words.’’ But the poetic language and form he
experimented with during that crucial phase of his
career was no mere library poet’s fixation on the
ornamental and esoteric, nor any reclusive linguis-
tic introversion. Hayden was seeking ways, on his
own terms, to make the techniques and innova-
tionsoftheNewPoetrymovementofthetwenties
and thirties his own, to bringallthe resources of
the English language—classical and vernacular,
popular and academic—to bear on the illumina-
tion of Afro-American experience. He had ‘‘always
wanted to be a Negro poet... the same way Yeats
is an Irish poet.’’ So he had always resisted the
private temptation and the public call to restrict
himself to the treatment of exclusively black expe-
rience. Yet he felt it was no paradox that he con-
sistently found his most intensely universal
symbols for human striving and strife in the mate-
rials of Afro-American life.
So with the appearance in 1962 of his fourth
book,A Ballad of Remembrance, it was a Robert
Hayden ‘‘meditative, ironic, and richly human’’—
qualities he ascribes to Mark Van Doren in that
volume’s title poem—who, full-voiced and with
consummate control, created from ‘‘the rocking
loom of history’’ and the scenes of modern Amer-
ican life the sweeping mosaic of word, color,
image, syntax, music, and portraiture that won
him the grand prize for poetry at the first World
Festival of Negro Arts at Dakar, Senegal, in 1966.
With this book the recognition of Hayden’s
achievements on the terms he sought it—as a
poet and not as ‘‘a species of race-relations
man’’—was assured by the brilliant performances
of ‘‘The Diver,’’ ‘‘The Ballad of Sue Ellen Wester-
field,’’ ‘‘An Inference of Mexico,’’ ‘‘Tour 5,’’
‘‘Homage to the Empress of the Blues,’’ ‘‘Witch
Doctor,’’ ‘‘Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sun-
day,’’ ‘‘Those Winter Sundays,’’ ‘‘Middle Pas-
sage,’’ ‘‘The Ballad of Nat Turner,’’ ‘‘Runagate
Runagate,’’ and ‘‘Frederick Douglass.’’
Between 1962 and his death in February of
1980 Robert Hayden published five more books
of poetry:Selected Poemsin 1966,Words in the
Mourning Timein 1970,The Night-Blooming Cer-
eus in 1972, Angle of Ascent in 1975 (which
recapped the work of the previous fifteen years);
and finally the first edition ofAmerican Journalin- In 1967, he publishedKaleidoscope: Poems by
American Negro Poets; and in 1971,Afro-American
Literature: An Introduction. After twenty-two
years’ service at Fisk University, he went home to
Michigan in 1968. He spent the final decade of his
life dividing his time among his family, yet another
generation of students, and a poetry that (after his
favorite volume,The Night-Blooming Cereus), was
less embossed, less erudite, more serene even when
dealing with the violence and chaos of the times,
unguardedly conversational, and measurably
freer—freed now, as one perceptive reviewer
realized, through an imagination given wings
by wisdom, style, and the science of language.
That hard-won freedom permitted Hayden
inAmerican Journalto return with greater imag-
inative detachment and detail than before to the
scenes of the childhood where, by his own
acknowledgment, ‘‘cruel and dreadful things hap-
pened and I was exposed to all kinds of... really
soul-shattering experiences in the home and all
around me.’’ And indeed, the book’s emotional
center lies in theElegies for Paradise Valleystirred
by the poet-persona’s memory of a seance his
mother arranged with a counterfeit gypsy to con-
tact the spirit of a murdered uncle. Returning
with Uncle Crip from now vanished rooms and
dead streets to flood the poet’s mind are the
names and faces that make Paradise Valley a
human kaleidoscope. And here in kaleidoscopic
whirl, carefully wrought but unobtrusive, are all
of Hayden’s trademarks as a poet: the sensuous
delight with aural texture and rhythm; the fluid
syntactic and semantic shifts between the spare
and the ornamental, the colloquial and the eso-
teric; the line lengths expanded and contracted for
sinuous and staccato effects; the haiku-like con-
centration of image. Limned with panoramic
sweep and surreal juxtapositions amidst a pro-
gression of subtly shifting stanzaic forms,
human character here takes on the intense colora-
tion of the exotic, the idiosyncratic, the alien, yet is
shaded as almost always in Hayden’s work by the
common bonds of dying, of loving, and of evil....
By contrast, the poems in the book’s fourth
section—on a loose spectrum of personal, religious,
social, and political themes—are less intensely
dramatic and ironic; and those that treat expressly
Runagate Runagate