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Lawrence T. Potter
Hayden, Robert Earl (1913–1980)
Born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Paradise Valley, a
neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan, to parents
Asa and Ruth Sheffey, Robert E. Hayden was re-
named and reared by adoptive parents, William
and Sue Hayden, who were family friends. Four
loving but quarrelsome and impoverished parents
made childhood difficult for the young Robert.
Nevertheless, he persisted against difficult cir-
cumstances to become a renowned poet. From
1931, when he published his first poem, to 1982,
when the final version of his American Journal ap-
peared posthumously, Hayden’s poetry changed
dramatically. While Hayden’s early poems imitate
revered precursors, including Countee Cullen and
Langston Hughes, his dense, experimental, and
groundbreaking poems on African-American his-
tory define his middle period. Characterized by
its spare diction and precise symbolist imagery,
Hayden’s later poetry makes a singular contribu-
tion to the African-American poetic tradition. But
Hayden’s life and work also display continuities:
sensitivity to poetry’s liberating force, a commit-
ment to wrestle poetic art’s difficulties, and a defi-
ant championing of the poet’s duty to be first and
foremost a poet.
With eyes that were damaged at birth, Hayden
suffered from poor vision, but the precocious
teenage Hayden committed himself to poetry. He
avidly read the HARLEM RENAISSANCE poets, the
British romantics, and Hart Crane. After a social
worker arranged tuition, Hayden attended Detroit
City College. During the depression, he worked
for the WPA Federal Writers’ Project researching
the antislavery movement’s history. A John Reed
Club participant, Hayden absorbed Marxist no-
tions of the writer’s role in the class struggle and
gave a reading at a Detroit United Auto Work-
ers rally. These activities and his didactic verse
resulted in Hayden being tagged “ ‘The People’s
Poet’ of Detroit” (Fetrow, 7). In 1940 Hayden
married Erma Inez Morris. The couple converted
to the Bahá’í faith. Attending the University of
Michigan, Hayden studied with W. H. Auden and
attained an M.A. in English; in 1946, he was ap-
pointed to assistant professor of English at Fisk
University. In 1969 he became professor of Eng-
lish at the University of Michigan, his final aca-
demic appointment.
Perhaps judging too harshly, Hayden eventually
dismissed his first book, Heart-Shape in the Dust
(1940), as apprentice work. The collection includes
poems derivative of Harlem Renaissance themes,
imitations of British romantic poetry, and antira-
cist, proworker protest poems (Hatcher, 64–66).
Bearing titles such as “Poem in Time of War” and
“The Negro to America,” the protest poems achieve
little more than leftist political statements. For ex-
ample, with the refrain “Hear me, black brothers,
/ White brothers, hear me,” “Speech” calls for pro-
letarian solidarity against the capitalists (12–13).
Hayden ensured that Heart-Shape’s poems would
not appear in his Collected Poems (1985), which
includes poems, many significantly revised, from
all his other books.
During the 1940s, Hayden struggled to write
poems adequate to his ambition. Eschewing didac-
ticism, Hayden wrote poems, including “Runagate
Runagate” and “Fredrick Douglas,” that disman-
tle stereotypes about African-American history
to recover the heroism of the African-American
struggle for liberation. These poems utilize the his-
torical knowledge Hayden accrued from his Fed-
eral Writers Project research and subsequent study.
One such poem, “Middle Passage,” deals with the
1839 rebellion of enslaved Africans on the Amis-
tad. Complexly weaving the authorial voice with
those of slave owners and slave ships’ officers and
crew members, the poem’s climactic lines herald
the revolt’s leader:The deep immortal human wish,
the timeless will:238 Hayden, Robert Earl