elements of Hayden’s Bahai faith veer unperturb-
ingly but less arrestingly toward the sectarian and
declamatory. ‘‘Double Feature’’ playfully affirms
the momentary relief cinematic fantasy offered to
childhood comrades besieged by the miasmic ills of
urban poverty. ‘‘Killing the Calves’’ links by cau-
tious simile the squander abundance breeds with
the murderous horror of My Lai. In ‘‘The Year of
the Child,’’ Hayden orchestrates a rite of passage
for his newborn grandson, bestowing names as
protective talismans ‘‘inaworldthatis/noplace
for a child.’’ And in ‘‘The Islands’’ the collision the
narrator feels between the tropics’ lush ‘‘chromatic
torpor’’ and the islanders’ oppression-bred scorn,
hostility, and raucous anger develops in lyric coun-
terpoint first to the momentary fusion of his voice
with their patois (a recurrent Hayden technique)
and, then, to his release from history’s endless,
enervating evils in the fleeting, transcendental
beauty of a ‘‘morning like a god in peacock-flower
mantle dancing.’’...
Source:John S. Wright, ‘‘Homage to a Mystery Boy,’’ in
Georgia Review, Vol. 36, No. 4, Winter 1982, pp. 904–11.
Michael Paul Novak
In the following excerpt, Novak presents an over-
view of Hayden’s oeuvre, highlighting ‘‘Runagate
Runagate,’’ and argues that the poet deserves more
critical attention.
The emergence of Afro-American studies has
caused a considerable scramble among publishing
houses to produce anthologies of Black American
Literatureandtoincludeblack writers in antholo-
gies of American Literature. Some of this activity
has been admirable, atoning for a neglect, that
probably only prejudice can finally account for, of
writers of true significance like Frederick Douglass
and Jean Toomer. But in the publishers’ zeal to
make amends and profits, sentimental and clumsy
writers of the past, plus numerous contemporaries
who try to substitute hysterical indignation for
craft, are being presented as artists of importance.
Anthology after anthology publishes black writers,
particularly poets, who were neglected not because
they were black but because they deserved to be
neglected.
Robert Hayden, a black poet of considerable
talent, was neglected for over three decades, and
even today amid the hurried search for writers of
his race he has not received his due. Hayden’s first
four volumes of poetry were all published in pri-
vate or limited editions. His first significant rec-
ognition did not come until 1965, and, with ironic
appropriateness, it occurred in Dakar, Senegal,
where his volume of poemsA Ballad of Remem-
brance(published in a limited edition in London)
won the Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World
Festival of Negro Arts. This was followed by his
Selected Poemspublished in 1966 by October
House and the 1970 Words In the Mourning
Timeby the same publisher. This latest book
was nominated for the National Book Award.
Robert Hayden was born in Detroit in 1913
and educated at Wayne State University and at
the University of Michigan where he won a Hop-
wood Award for his poetry. Most of his teaching
has been done at Fisk University but recently he
returned to the University of Michigan where he
is now a Professor of English. He is married, the
father of a grown daughter. A tall, attractive man,
Hayden wears extremely thick eyeglasses and has
had difficulty with his eyesight since childhood.
Although many of his poems deal directly
with the experience of being black in America
and have appeared in magazines likePhylonand
Negro Digestand he has edited what is one of the
better anthologies of the poetry of Negro Amer-
icans,Kaleidoscope, Hayden has stressed in his
public statements that he does not want race to
enter into judgements of his poetry. As the editor
ofKaleidoscopehe describes his own attitude in
the third person: ‘‘Opposed to the chauvinistic
and the doctrinaire, he sees no reason why a
Negro poet should be limited to ‘racial utterance’
or to having his writing judged by standards dif-
ferent from those applied to the work of other
poets.’’ He obviously does not feel he inherited a
black aesthetic with the color of his skin. Today
when many of the young black writers in their
understandable wrath against the criminal treat-
ment of their people seem to be saying that suffer-
ing is an exclusive property of their race and that
black writing is for blacks... Robert Hayden’s
attitude must sound suspiciously like the poetic
version of integration.AT THE CORE OF HAYDEN’S WORK IS
SUFFERING, BUT THE SUFFERING IS NOT LIMITED TO
THAT CAUSED BY RACIAL PREJUDICE.’’Runagate Runagate