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Fall 1981

World Order

In Memoriam:

In Gratitude for Robert Hayden

Julius Lester

Words for Robert Hayden

Jacob Miller

A Life Upon These Shores

Pontheolla T. Williams

Toward the Silence

Donna Denizé

The Bahá’í Muse:

Religion in Robert Hayden’s Poetry

Gerald Parks

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 16, NUMBER 1 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY

Editorial Board:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY J. FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091. Application to Mail at Second-class postage rates is pending at Wilmette, IL. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WORLD ORDER, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts should be typewritten and double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end. The contributor should keep a carbon copy. Return postage should be included.

Subscription rates: USA, 1 year, $6.00; 2 years, $11.00; single copies, $1.60. All other countries, 1 year, $7.00; 2 years, $13.00; single copes $1.60.

Copyright © 1982, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, All Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2 History Repeating Itself In Iran

Editorial

4 Words for Robert Hayden

poem by Jacob Miller

6 Interchange: Letters From and to the Editor

11 Robert Hayden: A Life Upon These Shores

by Pontheolla T. Williams

35 Toward the Silence

poem by Donna Denizé

37 The Bahá’í Muse: Religion in Robert Hayden’s

Poetry, by Gerald Parks

50 In Memoriam: In Gratitude for Robert Hayden

by Julius Lester

Inside back cover: Authors and Artists in This Issue

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History Repeating Itself in Iran

FOR THE LAST TWO YEARS history has been repeating itself in Iran. All over the country a fanatical and ruthless religious establishment launched a campaign of extermination against the Bahá’í community reminiscent of the persecutions of 1848-53, 1896, 1903, 1906-11, and 1955. Once again are heard the voices demanding the punishment of the innocent. Once again self-proclaimed guardians of religion are leading an ignorant populace in attacking their fellow-citizens, burning houses, raping, looting, murdering.

Government officials either stand aside, leaving the mobs free to do their will, or actively cooperate with the bigots. Last year the nine members of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Iran vanished without a trace. More recently, revolutionary tribunals have pronounced death sentences, and firing squads have executed the members of the Local Spiritual Assemblies of Tabríz, Hamadan, and Yazd. In many instances, the condemned were tortured before being put to death.

The charges against the Bahá’ís are old and tired, and some—corruption on earth and warring against God—are so outlandish that no enlightened human being could take them seriously. The trials and executions have nothing to do with the administration of justice. They are rather a fiendish drama whose purpose is to shatter, to intimidate, and to force “the heretics” to recant their faith.

Observing these events one feels transported into earlier ages and imagines oneself a contemporary of Christians in pagan Rome or of the Bábís in nineteenth-century Iran. Instinctively, one knows the outcome of events: the cause of the victims will triumph; the persecutors will earn eternal shame.

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Words for Robert Hayden

(d. Feb. 1980)

A winter night blisters the cemetery with frost,

each step finds ice, getting cracked at the edges,

stiff and brittle in the shadow of headstones.

And each grave is a different page from the same book,

each chapter is another generation.

Standing by your grave, pausing briefly, at the

corner of a movement—I begin reading as the

pale profile of a tree becomes your hospital bed,

the twisted branches, your stitches and tubes,

and in the fine powder of snow, your tears that night.

The book is written with the logic of inertia,

that is, no matter what, all continues—

And the moon, quiet as the memory itself,

is draped by clouds which crowd the sky silver.

Dizzy with that quick miracle of confusion which

the survivors call grief, I finally understand the

clumsy vanity of mourning that you knew so well.

And we talk, as was our custom, but not of Yeats or

the elegiac poets, not of culture or aesthetics—

The fear of flaws, of locating a theme or blindly

scratching at syllables in the dark, is dismissed;

instead we speak of the awful weight of awareness,

of vivid perceptions, made all the more acute

by wrinkled skin and a pair of feeble eyes.

As the sun leaves its womb and pierces the sky

with the smoothness of a razor, I exit

with thoughts of the nomadic relief of the soul,

with thoughts of that precious “angle of ascent.”

A hollow heat in the home of the chest

draws shoulders forward; the piston in the knees

moves legs mechanically—As the tired city

stretches and yawns beneath warm sheets,

my mind plays back the whispers of old talks.

Yet, I know that I can never hope to trace the

diadem of your days, language goes only so far.

Besides, your page could easily be a book and

the reading, a lifetime.

What is truly crucial is that you were right:

that the flaws must always be forgiven,

that what is human must always be treasured, and

that what you called fundamental must be the

clear and vibrant voice of our next generation.

—Jacob Miller

Copyright © 1981 by Jacob Miller. The poem will appear in Sleep is a Ritual of Disorder to be published in 1981.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

ROBERT HAYDEN, our poetry editor since 1968, died on 25 February 1980. But he has not left our hearts, nor has his presence and the poetic ideals and standards for which he stood ceased to animate our deliberations.

In our Fall 1980/Winter 1981 issue we published a short tribute to Robert Hayden, the poet. In our Spring/Summer 1981 issue we hinted at another side of our much-loved and much-missed colleague, Bob Hayden—the irrepressible wit and humorist with a seemingly endless store of anecdotes, the visionary, the firm defender of the important role poetry plays in our lives, the person determined to be a man and a poet without limiting labels.

How well we remember the vibrancy he brought to the Editorial Board meetings in New Haven that he occasionally was able to attend, the sparkling conversation at dinners we were all loath to end, and the small-boy-escaped-from-school enthusiasm when we stole away from our long meetings for an hour to shop for trifles in the Yale Coop. I will never be able to pass the Bahá’í House of Worship in Wilmette without remembering the day he showed me a walk encircling the building (that I had never noticed), all the while peering through his heavy glasses to point out flowers, birds, leaves, trees that for him were the stuff of poetry.

Replace Robert Hayden we cannot. But we are determined to preserve his memory and to carry on the high standards he set for poetry published in World Order. In this issue we are proud to offer a tribute to Hayden. Indeed, it is a double tribute for almost every piece we now publish—a biographical sketch, an essay on his religious poetry, an in memoriam tribute, and two poems—comes to us unsolicited from people who stepped forward to pay their last respects to Robert Hayden, a friend and teacher who evoked love and admiration in them as he did in us.

To the Editor

THE DEIFICATION OF JESUS

Although I was much impressed by Mr. [Jack] McLean’s “The Deification of Jesus” (Spring/ Summer 1980), I have some reservations about the last paragraph of the article where he alleges a contradiction between John 1:3 and The Kitáb-i-Íqán, p. 103. Although certain differences do indeed exist between the biblical record and the Bahá’í writings, I do not feel that this is one of them.

The verse from John in question asserts that all things were created by the Word of God, brought into the world through Jesus. The Bahá’í teachings are in full agreement. Bahá’u’lláh wrote, “the irresistible Word of God . . . is the Cause of the entire creation” (Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 140). And again, man is “the creature which the Word of God hath fashioned” (Gleanings, p. 318). There are many similar statements in the Bahá’í writings, too numerous to mention here. Briefly, in the Bahá’í view, creation is performed by the Manifestation of God, the Word incarnate, in each age, a process which has proceeded from eternity (see Selections from the Writings of the Báb, p. 125).

‘Abdu’l-Bahá explained that whenever we attribute something to God, we refer not to the unknowable Essence but to the Manifestation. These great Prophets are the embodiments of God’s perfections, names, and antibutes (Some Answered Questions, p. 147). Creation, an attribute, is one of the functions of the Manifestation.

The statement, “‘But for Thee, I would not have created the heavens’” (Kitáb-i-Íqán, p. 103), referred to by Mr. McLean, presents no real problem. Here we find one of those incredible paradoxes in the Bahá’í writings. The “I,” the Word made flesh or the Manifestation, is the Origin of creation. Yet, at the same time, the “Thee,” also the Manifestation, the [Page 7] Perfect Man (see, for example, Bahá’í World Faith, pp. 70-71), is the Objective of Creation as well (the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and End).

MARK A. FOSTER

Mississippi State, Mississippi

Jack McLean’s “The Deification of Jesus” (Spring/Summer 1980) is to be commended for its generally excellent exposition of the development of ideas in Christianity. Mr. McLean notes that Saint Paul is a problematic figure and that some of Paul’s writings present peculiar interpretations of Jesus vis-à-vis those of other early Christians. Problematic as Paul may be, I feel that Mr. McLean has wrongly attributed to Paul belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus and that this belief of Paul’s is somehow connected to the mystery cults (p. 27).

Paul’s most explicit description of the resurrection occurs in I Cor. 15. In verses 3-8, Paul recites an early Christian formula on the resurrection, which he himself “received” from his first Christian teachers. The formula consists of four points: 1) “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures” (v. 3b); 2) “he was buried” (v. 4a); 3) “he was raised in accordance with the scriptures” (v. 4b); and 4) that he appeared to a number of witnesses (vv. 5-8). In trying to understand how these four statements relate to one another, it is helpful to see what types of statements they are. There exists a definite pattern, where there is first an expression of faith (vv. 3b and 4b) and then a statement which guarantees the historical character of the expressed belief. Thus the historicity of the theological assertion put forth by the primitive community that Jesus’ death was for our sins and in accordance with the scriptures is confirmed by the statement “he was buried.” In the same manner, the expression of faith “he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” is confirmed by listing appearances. The verb ōphthē (literally, “was seen”) is used to indicate the nature of the appearances. Reginald Fuller, in The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives (New York: Macmillan, 1971), p. 11, notes that in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament used extensively by Paul) ōphthē is used to describe the appearances of Angels (Ex. 3:2) and in theophanies such as Ex. 6:3: “I appeared (ōphthēn) to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob, as God Almighty.” Fuller concludes that

What is seen and what is heard can only be described as revelation. These are disclosures not of something which is visible or discernible within this world or age by ordinary sight or insight: they are disclosures that come from “heaven above” to this world or . . . from the eschatological future to the present. It is in such a context that we must place the ōphthē of I Cor. 15:5-7. . . . They designate not necessarily visions in a subjective sense . . . but a revelatory self-disclosure or disclosure by God of the eschatologically resurrected Christos.

When Paul states that Jesus was raised, he is describing an act of God upon Jesus in light of the Jewish apocalyptic tradition. There are three implicit assumptions within the tradition: 1) The raising is an interventive act of God; 2) it is a raising in order to receive judgment of one’s final destiny; and 3) it is characterized as an eschatological transition from one mode of existence into an entirely transformed condition. In the Book of Daniel this apocalyptic hope is expressed as follows: “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to everlasting shame. And the wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and some of the many righteous as the stars for ever and ever.” (Cf. Mark 12:25; Matt. 22:30; Luke 20:35.) Paul’s description of the transformed resurrection body is found near the end of I Cor. 15: “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown in physical body, it is raised a spiritual body” (vv. 42-44). It seems clear that Paul is strongly asserting that the resurrection of Jesus is the first instance of God’s raising act, and that this first instance is of a determinative nature—i.e., the resurrection of Jesus and the general resurrection of the dead are, in Paul’s thought, of the same [Page 8] type of eschatological transformation and not a physical resurrection.

Also, I feel that Mr. McLean’s brief description of the “Gnostic Jesus” suffers because of questionable methodology. It appears that Gnosticism has been criticized in the article largely because Shoghi Effendi describes it as one of those “popular cults” and “fashionable and evasive philosophies” prevalent during the infancy of Christianity. However, in the same sentence, Shoghi Effendi also mentions Neo-Platonism along with Gnosticism, and it is evident that the Bahá’í writings draw positively from both of these “evasive” philosophies. (E.g., the Neo-Platonic ideas of creation as emanation and the co-eternality of the universe with God are echoed in Bahá’í scripture.) The Gnostics and Neo-Platonists were not always correct, but their efforts in gnosis has left us with some of the most profound myths and symbols of religious experience. (Cf. the gnostic motif of “The Stranger” hearing “The Call,” which initiates his journey to the “True Home” to the following passage of Bahá’u’lláh: “Wilt Thou keep back from Thee the stranger whom Thou didst call unto his most exalted Home beneath the shadow of the wings of Thy mercy, or cast away the wretched creature that hath hastened to attain the shores of the ocean of Thy wealth?” Prayers and Meditations, p. 270.)

Whether at not the Gnostics “held to fixed tenets of belief” (p. 31) must be shown through study of Gnostic texts and the history of the Gnostic community and not by interpreting Gnosticism through a broad, generalized statement found in Shoghi Effendi’s writings. For example, another way of looking at the matter is to see that the Gnostics were elitists, who felt that true gnosis could only be attained by a few souls. Thus their beliefs became evasive depending on to whom they spoke. (See Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random, 1979), pp. 14-46, 140).

I believe that although these two points are not major concerns of Mr. McLean’s article they should be noted since 1) the resurrection remains a controversial topic amongst Christians today and 2) the problems involved in using the writings of the Central Figures of the Bahá’í Faith when examining the history of religions has yet to be adequately explored.

STEVEN SCHOLL

Institute of Islamic Studies

McGill University

Montreal, Quebec

I welcome the opportunity to respond to the letters of Mark A. Foster and Steven Scholl dealing with the questions of logos theology and resurrection, respectively, in St. Paul, as I treated them in my paper “The Deification of Jesus.” . . . I think the points that they raise are quite valid, particularly Mr. Foster’s points on the logos in Bahá’í teaching. . . . Incidentally, Juan Ricardo Cole had raised the same point to me about the logos in private correspondence.

I appreciate the correction about the Word of God’s being the agent of creation. Does this mean, however, that Bahá’ís may no longer refer to God as the “Creator”? If we say that God creates through the agency of the Word, does that mean that there are then in some sense two creators rather than one? I suppose that my rhetorical questions indicate that there are real rational barriers to understanding the process. I would welcome any explanations. Of course, this very question provoked endless debate in Christianity, and Bahá’u’lláh has warned us not to tamper with the belief in the unity of God. Ultimately, I suppose that this is one question which properly qualifies as a mystery. Aside from this, the comments do serve to point out that the logos-word theology is an exact parallel to Bahá’í teaching, without its being confined to Jesus alone, of course.

Steven Scholl rightly points out that the resurrection belief grew out of apostolic teaching. It is without question gospel in origin. Yet I did not qualify St. Paul as the originator of the doctrine, only that the resurrection teaching paralleled those of the mystery cults, and I inferred a direct influence on St. Paul. Mr. Scholl rightly refers to the glorification theme of the physical body in Paul’s writings. However, in spite of Paul’s teaching of the glorified or “spiritual body,” it must be recognized that Christianity has never divested itself of the resurrection of the body, which is quite scriptural. We have, for example, Christ speaking to the disciples after the resurrection saying, “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). Ultimately, Christianity has attempted to reconcile this flesh-spirit dichotomy by saying that the body will be glorified. But whether this glorified body will be visible and what form it will take is a matter of speculation.

JACK McLEAN

Gatineau, Quebec

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Robert Hayden: A Life Upon These Shores

BY PONTHEOLLA T. WILLIAMS

Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Pontheolla T. Williams.

ROBERT HAYDEN’S mother, Gladys Finn, was born of racially mixed ancestry. In her late teens she changed her name to Ruth, joined a circus, and ran away from her home in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Eventually she landed in Detroit, Michigan, where she met and married Asa Sheffey, a laborer from West Virginia, by whom she had a son on 4 August 1913. When her son was eighteen months old, she gave him to William and Sue Ellen Hayden and left for New York.

The near-sighted baby was rechristened Robert Hayden and became the son of the Hayden couple, in name if not in fact. Although the Haydens told the boy otherwise, they never legally adopted him. Perhaps that was the reason they did not take a firm stand against the Sheffeys’ visits to their home to see the boy or prevent Robert’s visits to his mother’s house. Indeed, there were times when Mrs. Hayden herself took Robert to see his real mother.

Hayden recalled Ruth Shefiey as a beautiful woman, vivacious and fond of dancing. She introduced him to the theatrical and cultural life of Buffalo, where she had relocated after she left Asa Sheffey and married Albert Moore, a cabaret owner. The boy, who had known only lower-class life in Detroit, was thoroughly enchanted. He vividly recalled his times with his mother—the quiet boat rides, the theater excursions, the aptly chosen gifts —as experiences that immediately and indelibly captured his imagination. Such glimpses of culture and refinement played a part in putting his life on a track that would later lead to a less ethnically centered view of art than that espoused by many black artists.

Mixed with his memory of those happy holidays from life in the ghetto were bitter recollections of “a certain amount of jealousy” that arose between his adoptive parents and his real mother. Mrs. Sheffey told him that, contrary to what the Haydens claimed, he had never been legally adopted, that he was always to be “her” son. Consequently, the Haydens and Mrs. Sheffey were trapped in a tenacious battle for Robert’s affections, while the helpless object of their struggle suffered traumas that affected him until his death.

Added to the distressful situation created by Mrs. Sheffey’s failure to release her son to the Haydens’ care were Mrs. Sheffey’s efforts to maintain contact with him. Asa Sheffey occasionally came from Gary, Indiana, where he had found work, to visit his son. To impress the boy of ten or twelve, he took him on shopping tours and appealed to his affections through gifts. When Robert visited his father in Gary, however, his stay was stormy. Between the good times, when his father displayed what Hayden recalled as “his outrageous humor” and lavished the usual gifts upon him, there were drinking bouts during which he disparaged his estranged wife. Hayden, who adored his glamorous mother, resented the attacks and came to feel indignation toward his father. Decades later Hayden revealed [Page 12] that he could not develop a genuine feeling of love for the man, who never really understood the “queer sort of boy” he had fathered.

The child’s nearsightedness was a pronounced handicap. Because of it he could not engage in athletics or other activities usual for one of his age. He withdrew and, in his isolation, developed an abiding passion for reading. According to Hayden himself, he became a nonathletic, bookish little boy, one who would understandably appear strange to a man with his father’s virile energy.

William Hayden, on the contrary, led a life of quiet, if troubled, poverty. A laborer, he was able to afford his family only a hand-to-mouth existence even when he was working. When he was unemployed, the family accepted public welfare. His existence was further troubled by his dissatisfaction with his uncertain status as an adoptive parent and the fact that he and Mrs. Hayden did not get along very well. As a devout Baptist fundamentalist, he ruled his household sternly and frowned upon any display of frivolity. For example, he pronounced that Bessie Smith’s “low-down songs could not be played on their” victrola. This dictum pleased neither his wife, who was fond of the blues, nor Robert, who was later to pay tribute to the famous blues singer in his poem “Homage to the Empress of the Blues.” William Hayden was, however, the father to whom, many years later, the poet offered a poignant, if belated, tribute in “Those Winter Sundays.” He was also “Pa,” who, though uneducated himself, undertook to finance his adopted son’s college education.

Sue Hayden was the “handsome woman” who haggled with Italian and Jewish butchers over choice cuts of meat for her family. It was she who regaled Robert with Afro-American folktales, stories of Southern racial atrocities and her own Post-Civil War experiences, when she was a chambermaid on Ohio River steamers. Her first marriage had been to Jim Barlow, a handsome man who perhaps was white and who had at one time worked on the same river steamers. She could never forget him and, unfortunately, never let William Hayden forget him either, thus feeding the fires of discontent in their household.

Her memories of life in the South provided a rich fund of inspiration and material for Hayden’s poetry. It is her relationship with Jim Barlow, overlaid with his impressions of his real mother, that he fictionalized in “The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield.” Hayden was deeply affected by the fact that his real mother looked white. He was also impressed by her accounts of her marriage to a man who looked white. His concern with racial appearance was thus awakened. He asserted, for example, that he was almost as fair as his white playmates. One can imagine the effect of such preoccupations on a young boy.

These, then, were the basic elements of the “terrible love-hate relationship[s]” that Hayden could not forget. He described them in “Those Winter Sundays” as “the chronic angers of that house.” It was in this household that he remained, however, until he was twenty-nine, and it was here that he retreated more deeply into the private world [Page 13] of the poetic imagination. He recalled in his interview with Paul McCluskey, his editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, that “the conflicts, the quarreling [and] the tension kept [the family] most of the time on the edge of some shrill domestic calamity” that consequently “turned [him] upon [himself].” His family situation, he said, left him with “a feeling of apartness, noninvolvement . . . half in and out of things.” He attributed his “nervousness” to this troubled household and became upset at any mention of those painful experiences. Yet, in a softening of his description of Pa Hayden, the poet later said “he did like fun.” Sometimes he even joined the jovial group in the household including Ma Hayden and Aunt Roxie (her daughter by Jim Barlow), who cajoled him to tell some “tales.” It is out of both the positive and negative aspects of his ordeals that he created some of his most poignant lyrics, such as “The Whipping” and “October.”

“Sunflowers gangled there”

IF the Hayden household was penurious, insecure, and explosive, the larger world of their Detroit neighborhood was no less so. But like life in the Hayden home, the ghetto around it fed Hayden’s poetic imagination.

The neighborhood in which Robert was born and where the Haydens lived was a slum. By 1918 the area had rapidly expanded to some twenty city blocks and was becoming predominantly black, as Jews, Italians, Irish, and others moved away. Hayden recalled that the area, from 1928 through the early 1950s, was “the most notorious part of town.” Beacon Street was in the old East Side section near downtown Detroit, where lived those “who feared alarming fists of snow / on the door and those who feared the riot-squad of statistics.” Here, too, the real-life counterparts of the personae of “Summertime and the Living” made their home, those who were plagued with “quarrels and shattered glass” because they were “so harshened after each unrelenting day / that they were shouting-angry.” They endured, he wrote, because they were strong and had Pan-Africanist dreams of “Ethiopia spreading her gorgeous wings.”

“‘Incense of the Lucky Virgin’” furnishes a particularly poignant expression of this ethos. The subject is a deserted wife and mother who tries magic and prayer to bring her husband back and is finally driven to infanticide as an alternative to watching her children starve:

Incense of the Lucky Virgin,

High John the Conqueror

didn’t bring him home again,

didn’t get his children fed,

get his children fed.

I prayed and what did prayer avail?

My candles held no power.

An evening came I prayed no more

and blew my candles out,

oh blew my candles out

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Garland was too quick for me

(he didn’t yell once as he ran);

Cieola, Willie Mae

won’t be hungry any more,

oh they’ll never cry and hunger

any more.

These people could be devoutly religious as he shows in “Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday” where the cathartic effect of the “Queen’s” fundamentalist church ritual eases their despair:

. . . sing Jesus down

to help with struggling and doing

without and being colored

all through blue Monday?

Till way next Sunday?

Yet they could be quite worldly, temporarily banishing the grimness of ghetto life through the magic of the “Homage to the Empress of the Blues” with her secular song:

She came out on the stage in yards of

pearls, emerging like

a favorite scenic view, flashed her

golden smile and sang.

And despite the prevailing harshness of conditions, they were quite capable of feeling vicarious joy when the lucky few—for example, the “big splendiferous / Jack Johnson in his diamond limousine”—achieved success in the world beyond the ghetto.

Until the early 1930s, when a new wave of southern black immigrants flooded the area, the neighborhood had a multiracial character. Hayden recalls those times in several poems, notably “The Rabbi,” which reflects the Afro-American influx and the widespread departures of the Jews, many of whose children were his playmates. The poem treats the distance between the world of the child and of the adult, between innocence and experience (none of the children understands the religious rituals performed by the Rabbi), and explores the relationship between belief and prejudice. Thus a child who has not yet learned the differences perceived by adults can understand the departure of his friends only in terms of a mysterious religious ritual: “the Rabbi bore . . . [his] friends off / in his prayer shawl.”

Some blacks who were financially better off began to move away too. Among them were some of Hayden’s friends from the Second Baptist Church. Because they were fortunate enough to move to the more affluent West Side while he remained on the East Side, they began to “patronize” him. Their condescension left scars on his memories; yet they did not deter him from recalling his old neighborhood as one of the most colorful parts of the Detroit of that era. Indeed, he said that he could go on for the rest of his artistic life drawing on those memories.

In response to a question on racial prejudice in his neighborhood, Hayden said that, instead of bigotry, there was a feeling of victimization. Some landlords refused to repair the houses of their tenants, for example; but neglect was not universal. Jews and Italians did extend credit to his family. He had white playmates, the memories of whom no doubt inspired “The Rabbi.” Later Hayden was to recall that his own parents cautioned him against “running around with so and so,” reminding him that he was “colored.” He said that when he reached puberty whites warned him, “You’re colored, and I don’t want you playing with my girls.” Perhaps, however, [Page 15] it was the memory of the crucially important services Jews and Italians extended to his family and his pleasant memories of his playmates on which he based his claim that his childhood was relatively free from hard prejudice. The insight and compassion gained from his own interracial experiences and mixed ancestry imbued him with a warm humanistic world view that became a significant asset in his art.

“Who will sing Jesus down”

THE AFRO-AMERICAN CHURCH was a key feature in Hayden’s neighborhood and a vital factor in the lives of most of its people. As early as 1917 there were thirteen major black churches on Detroit’s East Side. According to George Edward Hayes, the churches were powerful forces that served socioeconomic and cultural as well as religious needs. Their force was recalled by Hayden who remembered that in the twenties and thirties, when he was growing up, the church was the center of his family life. His adoptive father was a member of the Second Baptist Church, one of the Detroit’s largest.

It was to this church that William Hayden took his adopted son. Here, Hayden said, he experienced a genuine, even near-mystical, conversion and became a member while still a child. He was involved in both the Sunday School and the Vacation Bible School, and became president of the Baptist Young People’s Union. More important to his literary development, he acted in the dramatic group, wrote for the church paper, and spoke at various programs. These activities gave him an enriching proximity to the ceremony, pomp, and splendor of the practices and rituals of the Afro-American fundamentalist church, experiences he would later transmute into poems such as “Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday.”

It is interesting that Hayden’s first religious vows were made to a church that approves the doctrine of the elect—that is, that only those who are baptized by immersion may be saved, a doctrine that stands in ironic contrast to his adult allegiance to the Bahá’í Faith, a religion that is inclusive rather than exclusive. Nevertheless, his early response to Baptist fundamentalism instilled the “God consciousness” he continued to feel until his death and created a depository of feeling and symbology for verse that, while it is free from attempts to extol Baptist precepts, as his Bahá’í verse is not free from extolling Bahá’í precepts, it is flavored with the fundamentalist Baptist convert’s idiomatic speech rhythms and Biblical allusions.

Toward the World Beyond the Ghetto

AFTER completing elementary school, Hayden attended classes briefly at the predominantly black Miller High School, located on Detroit’s East Side. Because his sight was so severely impaired, it was determined that he should be in a “sight-saving school.” Hence he was transferred to the predominantly white Northern High School in northeast Detroit. Despite the prejudice “we kids felt in being shut out of things,” Hayden said, he got on well there. He even won the High School Award for “Gold” (1934), a short story he wrote. His high school experiences helped lay the foundation for his later rejection of black literary iconoclasm, his acceptance of craftsmanship and artistic freedom, and his wish, in his own words, for “acceptance as a writer . . . not as . . . [a writer] with a particular racial identity.”

[Page 16] Even before he enrolled in high school, however, his interests in literature, creative writing, and the fine arts had crystallized. He recalled that he had read some books on scenario writing when he was in the fifth or sixth grade, though he did not mention any specific titles. He said he tried to rewrite the stories of plays and movies he had seen.

He was sixteen years old when he discovered modern poetry. It was, he continued, a dual discovery—that is, the discovery of the existence of both a modern Afro-American literary tradition and a modern mainstream American literary tradition. In his own attempts to write poetry he used Elinor Wylie and Countee Cullen as models. The title of his first volume, Heart Shape in the Dust, comes from Wylie’s “Hospes Comesque Coparis,” and his first published poem, “Africa,” owes much to Countee Cullen’s “Heritage.” Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Stephen Vincent Benét were other poets he read. Thus his first impressive experiences of poetry crossed the lines of ethnic traditions.

Hayden briefly attended the Detroit Institute of Musical Arts and took violin lessons with money made available by Aunt Roxie and by Mrs. Sheffey, who was, of course, determined to maintain her influence on her son’s life. He continued the lessons until his adoptive father, who eventually had to assume the expense, could no longer afford them. At the same time his congenitally impaired vision deteriorated greatly forcing him to sit so close to his music that it interfered with his playing and obstructed the view of the other musicians in both the high school and the Sunday School orchestras. Hence he had to quit these cherished activities. Hayden said that his interest in music was so important to him that it proved to be the decisive attraction of the woman he married. She was a concert pianist and delighted him then and later with her playing. Allusions to music form a minor thread that runs through his poetry. As early as 1942 Hayden gave tribute to the force of music in “Beethoven”:

Above the nervous bulletins of war,

The fingered-over rummage ends of talk,

This music builds its huge, superior

Energy. . . .

It is clear that Hayden’s secondary school experiences were a decisive force in making him a serious artist. He was exposed to the dynamics of racially integrated learning; he was introduced to the dual traditions of Afro-American and American literature; he began his study of Spanish, a study he pursued in college and used in the creation of his Mexican poems. In short, by 1931, Hayden had begun laying the foundation for a poetic position that was ethnic and yet crossed ethnic lines.

The Depression Years: 1930-1940

NINETEEN THIRTY, the year of Hayden’s graduation from Northern High School, was the beginning of a cataclysmic decade. America had been ripped apart by the stock market crash of 1929, and the ensuing Great Depression had affected not only the economic and political spheres but American letters as well. Hayden’s entrance into this tragic world as a young adult marks him as a member of the Depression generation.

He wanted to continue his education in college, but his family was on welfare. His adoptive father, he said, “never questioned the value of [his] going to school, but . . . could not obtain the necessary sixty-five dollars tuition fee.” He did, however, manage, [Page 17] with his father’s consent, to attend postgraduate classes at Cass High School. Hayden diligently sought work and accepted what was available. He worked in a grocery store. With the typewriter Albert Moore gave him, he set himself up as a public typist, preparing letters for people, and, for 25 or 50 cents a batch, typing songs for the choir at Second Baptist Church. To his adoptive parents’ displeasure, he issued numbers for a policy slips man, a procedure in the poor man’s gambling game, and he ran errands for people, including some who were of ill repute.

But Hayden continued to read, to write, and to “try to come to grips with . . . [himself].” The Second Baptist Church provided a public outlet for his talent. He remembered writing didactic short stories for the church paper, and he recalled a poem on the American Legion for which he was able to develop a marching rhythm. He was both energetic and imitative at this time, ready to try his hand at new things. For example, after reading Paul L. Dunbar’s poems in high school, he was inspired to try to write verse in dialect.

Because of his energy, talent, and education, the church elders decided to groom him for a leadership role; their specific suggestion was that he prepare himself for a career as an African missionary. Even though he participated in church activities, Hayden had known since the days when he was a bespectacled boy bent over books while other children were wrestling in the streets that he was incapable of a real commitment to the group spirit. As to the missionary suggestion, he commented, from the perspective of his years: “Now what would have become of me? I probably would have stood there and said the Hell with it all . . . would probably have become a voodoo doctor, a dancer . . . a medicine man.”

When Hayden was a high school student, he submitted to Harper Brothers a manuscript of poems he thought he entitled Songs at Eighteen. Most of them treated the Afro-American history of the period. The manuscript was rejected, but a poem that treated what was to become his major poetic theme, the black American experience, was accepted by Abbott’s Monthly and served as his introduction to the Afro-American audience.

The poem, “Africa,” echoes the primitivism of Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” and reflects Hayden’s tie to the waning Harlem Renaissance. Cullen’s speaker in “Heritage” considers and questions the Afro-American’s roots in Africa. He poses the question, “What is Africa to me?” and answers by comparing Africa to a “Book one thumbs / listlessly.” Then he draws the reader’s attention to his imagined sensuous qualities of Africa—a place of “tall defiant grass / where young lovers lie.” The speaker in Hayden’s “Africa,” on the contrary, extols the Afro-American’s tie to Africa and his pride in that continent as the “cradle of his race.” He gives an affirmative answer to the question Cullen poses and answers in the negative in “Heritage”:

Though Freedom’s light upon me shines,

My heart is native; my soul pines

For sight of thee, and all day long

I mourn and sing my fitful song:

“Dear Africa, you’re more to me

Than reeking jungle—ebon sea!

In thee I take undying pride—

Dark cradle of a race denied!”

As far as prosody is concerned, “Africa” initiates Hayden’s traditionalist period. The poem is formally structured: it is composed of five stanzas, each consisting of four couplets, some of which are closed, some open. The lines are octosyllabic, closely patterned [Page 18] on the Cullen model.

But Cullen’s influence on Hayden transcends that of a particular poem. From the outset of his career, Cullen had insisted on being accepted as a “poet” rather than a “Negro poet.” He had refused to be restricted to racial themes, preferring the universality of human consciousness to the tribalism of racial consciousness.” He was locked into the restrictions of the traditional English forms he had chosen, and his deepest poetic response was to the lyricism of Keats rather than to the social issues of his day: lynching of blacks, housing, and labor problems. Hayden in his turn argued against the tendency of American critics to label the established black writer as a spokesman for his race, and he criticized them for their habit of judging black poetry by a separate standard. Unlike Cullen, however, Hayden responded to social issues during the Great Depression, as he would later to World War II, the upheavals of the sixties, and the Vietnam War. But however much they may resent being called “Negro poets,” both writers, in fact, often treated racial themes. Some of Cullen’s finest verse suggests, in an unimpassioned way, the dilemma of being black in America, while Hayden’s poetry passionately evokes the historic plight of the black man in America.

Hayden was not to publish again, at least nationally, until 1937. His education and poetic growth, however, continued and were given a boost by a welfare case worker. Hayden recalled that during a visit to the welfare station, his family’s case worker expressed curiosity about two books he was carrying. He showed her copies of Cullen’s Copper Sun and told her that he, too, would publish a volume of poetry someday. His sincerity apparently was very impressive, for she eventually helped him obtain a college scholarship.

He left his postgraduate high school studies at Cass to become a freshman at Detroit City College, where he majored in Spanish with a view to a teaching career. He did not take poetry courses because he could not fit them into his schedule; however, he read T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others independently, and he continued to write. In 1936 the Detroit Collegian of Detroit City College (later Wayne State University), published “Epilogue,” his brief reminiscence of Keats.

Early in his college years Hayden began an association with a group of young writers including John Malcolm Brinnin and Kimon Friar. Some of the group espoused Marxism, identified with the labor movement and the class struggle, and wrote realistic didactic poetry. Hayden stated that their models as revolutionary poets were Sol Funaroff, Lola Ridge, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes.

Langston Hughes was then president of the League for the Struggle for Negro Rights, a leftist front organization. A key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes had already expressed its literary philosophy in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Later, during the thirties, when the Harlem Renaissance was petering out under the onslaught of the Great Depression, Hughes proclaimed a new revolutionary image for the Negro. In 1935, in a document that predated Richard Wright’s influential manifesto “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” Hughes declared himself solidly for class struggle. At the same time he said the Negro writer should [Page 19] reveal his ethnic qualities in order to destroy the white man’s stereotypes. He should expose bigotry in the unions, the “sick-sweet lies” of organized religion, and the false leadership of Negro opportunists. This philosophy clearly flavors the proletarian protest poems in Hayden’s first volume Heart Shape in the Dust, published in 1940.

Hughes was not only an influence on Hayden’s political and social views, but a literary mentor as well. When Hughes came to Detroit during the late thirties to see his play Drums of Haiti performed, Hayden, an actor in the play, met him. Over lunch Hayden gave him some of his poems to examine. Hughes encouraged him to continue writing but cautioned him against imitating others. Considering the nature of many of the poems in Heart Shape in the Dust, the criticism was justified.

Decades later Hayden acknowledged a debt to Hughes but stated that he grew to regard his verse as “too simplistic, very often careless in construction and development.” This judgment was foreshadowed when Hayden gave Hughes a sonnet to examine, and Hughes commented that he had never been able to write one. No doubt Hayden saw Hughes’ failure as an indication that he was unwilling to submit to the necessary rigors of the discipline or was caught up in social concerns to such an extent that his prosodic development was crippled.

By the time Hayden left Detroit City College in 1936, one credit hour short of graduation, to enter the working world as an employee of the Federal Government, his admiration for Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, no less than for Lola Ridge and Carl Sandburg, had firmly anchored his work in both the Afro-American and white literary traditions.

The Writers Project Years

FORCED in the midst of the Great Depression to earn his own living, Hayden faced the almost impossible task of securing any position. What he found was the grim reality of America’s unemployed—the world of hunger and dislocation. But he was not merely one of the millions of unemployed Americans; he was black into the bargain.

The Federal Writers Project, a part of the Works Project Administration, which was a government effort to create jobs, was a haven to which Hayden, among 6,686 other writers, fled. The necessary declaration of pauperism was humiliating and distasteful, but indignity was not new to Hayden. His family had submitted to this requirement at least since 1930. He made the declaration and was hired by the Detroit branch of the Project.

Hayden said that among his works for the Detroit Writers Project were essays on the anti-slavery movements in Detroit and Illinois. As he remembered, his most important undertaking was to supervise research into local history and folklore. His group investigated, without finding any interesting letters, the papers of a prominent Afro-American family in Detroit, the Lamberts, who had antecedents dating back to the slave era. At one time, John Brown had presented a sword [Page 20] to William Lambert, who was associated with the Underground Railroad. Although Hayden and his group were successful in compiling and publishing a calendar of the John Dancy-Booker T. Washington letters (now available in the Department of Archives of Wayne State University Library), Hayden believed that none of the materials were ever used.

Yet working on the anti-slavery movement essays, the Lambert project, and the Dancy-Washington project probably furthered Hayden’s interest in Afro-American history—an interest that lasted beyond the topical concerns of the thirties. He soon explored the poetic possibilities of such knowledge in Heart Shape in the Dust, in which he included a ballad about a slave hanged for leading a revolt. He declared in “What is Precious is Never to Forget”:

This is the spirit’s true armament,

Heart’s true program of defence—

That we remember the traveled

roads of our history.

The Project also gave Hayden and his black colleagues the opportunity of communicating with other Project writers; the result was an interracial exchange that eroded the insular world, which in many cases, was the black writer’s lot. Moreover, the contacts estallished by Afro-Americans within the group led to the exposure of their work to white audiences.

Though there was interracial contact, there was also a coterie of Afro-American writers, most of whom were in the Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and New York Projects, that grew up around the influential figure of Richard Wright.

The members of the Wright generation were born within the same decade, 1908-17. They shared, to some degree, memories (very youthful though they were in some cases) of the end of World War I and its aftermath of bloody race riots and lynchings. They were adolescents when the Harlem Renaissance flowered in the 1920s. They were shaped by the Great Depression, and their initiation rite into American society was the emasculating horror of the infamous Scottsboro Case. Hayden read Wright’s work and was influenced by his politics and literary style. He recalled that, too poor to purchase a copy of Uncle Tom’s Children, he read a library copy and was struck by its “daring and unprecedented subject matter.” In creating his short stories Wright had blended the techniques of social realism with his perceptions of the violent black-white confrontation in the South. Hayden took his literary cues for Heart Shape in the Dust from Wright’s short stories and his poem “Between the World and Me.” Like Wright, he denounced lynching and attacked capitalism. Hayden probably would have written about the lynch victim irrespective of Wright’s work, but Wright’s treatment of racial and social grievances provided him with a contemporary Afro-American model written in the mode of realism. Wright’s influence on Hayden was lasting; much of his work is socially realistic, and his forte was protest.

Hayden’s immediate response to Uncle Tom’s Children was a congratulatory note to Wright. Later, he occasionally sent him goodwill [Page 21] messages through mutual friends who were going to Chicago, but he never met Wright.

The Project years enabled Hayden to learn more about Marxism. Because of the Depression, the American Communist Party had succeeded in gaining the acceptance, although sometimes passive, of a substantial number of the nation’s most gifted writers. They expressed their conviction, through organizations established and controlled by the Party, that radical change based on Marxist theory was imperative. According to Wilson Record, the Party’s objective was to encourage the writers, without regard to race, to create a realistic literature, based on the facts of Negro life, that would develop Negro cultural nationalism for the immediate purpose of establishing a Negro nation in America, as well as promoting the working-class struggle.

While Hayden was not a member of the American Communist Party, or even of its associated organizations, he was exposed to its ideology in his college discussions and through his Project contacts. One of these contacts was the John Reed Club. Through the discussions and activities of its Detroit branch, Hayden came to understand Party ideology and developed strong reservations about Communism as a possible solution to the “Negro problem.” In his words, he developed an abhorrence of Communism because of its suppression of creative freedom, its rejection of artists, and its persecution of those who did not follow the Party line. Too religious as well as individualistic to join the Communist Party as Richard Wright had done, he remained on the “periphery of the radical movement.” He gave the John Reed Club credit for his “understanding” of what the political issues were in the United States and the world in general, as well as for the inspiration to consider cultural questions in his works. Above all, it gave him the “chance to write and to be involved in a literary circle.” The endorsement of Marxism evident in Heart Shape in the Dust is mild when contrasted to Wright’s in Uncle Tom’s Children. Whereas Wright makes a direct call for revolution and gives a clear-cut plan for its execution, Hayden limits himself to an appeal for black and white worker solidarity. His mass chant “These Are My People” gives his most direct appeal to the working class:

O white brother,

won’t you march with me?

Marching, marching, marching, marching—

Toward the day that is to be.

Though Hayden later turned away from Marxist ideology, his interest in it represented his first decisive step toward expanding his political consciousness—that is, his evolution from race to class consciousness, a departure that moved him toward the internationalism that begins to appear in Heart Shape in the Dust and becomes abundantly clear in the Mexican, Jewish, and World War II poems of A Ballad of Remembrance. His later disillusionment notwithstanding, the early interest in Marxist ideology was no more than a logical outgrowth of his background, which had deemphasized racial differences in the leveling influence of his pluralistic neighborhood and in his experience of integrated schools.

At bottom, Hayden was a cultural assimilationist rather than a Marxist—that is, Marxism simply offered him an opportunity to fuse his sense of racial identity with a broader historical movement. His reference point was [Page 22] no longer merely ethnic but ideological as well; instead of striving exclusively for limited racial advancement, he could participate in the larger struggle for social justice. The assimilationist tendency became a permanent part of Hayden’s philosophy and art. Although he rejected Communism’s political promise of brotherhood, he was later to accept the religious vision of world brotherhood of the Bahá’í Faith.

Jerre Mangione, the National Coordinating Editor of the Federal Writers Project, maintains that “Blacks were . . . [its] greatest beneficiaries,” citing the insights they received from their detailed investigation of Negro history, myth, and folklore. However, the immediate benefit Hayden enjoyed was the signal opportunity for national exposure. His poem “Autumnal” was one of four works by Afro-Americans included in American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and Verse by Members of the Federal Writers Project.

He wrote “Autumnal” while he was gaining his reputation as a proletarian-protest poet and while he was writing in a direct, hortatory style that was often sparsely symbolic. At the same time he was developing in some poems a literary realism and a more effective use of symbolism. For example, “Autumnal” points toward his later mastery of poetic craftsmanship. It is ostensibly a nature lyric, but it may also be read as a protest poem against lynching and a moving plea to pity its victim, effects accomplished through symbolism taken from nature:

Pity the rose

With death for root

And bleeding boughs

Bereft of fruit,

Pity the pheasant,

In the gilded wood

And the buck lying stark

In a snare of blood.

In the first part of the poem he paints a disturbing pastoral scene by inverting the usual pleasant connotations of the rose, a Christian symbol of love; the pheasant; and the deer. In contrast to the “guilded wood,” the rose suffers blight and death; the pheasant and the entrapped deer lie dead.

In the last half of the lyric nature itself is made to reflect disturbances, as what should ordinarily be a joyous time of thanksgiving for the natural harvest becomes the occasion for a harvest of blood. Ominous “Medusa trees,” “hollow skies,” “winds that rock,” a “bloody moon,” and reapers who gather sheaves that tear their hands characterize the scene.

Although Hayden does not mention race as such, the “buck” he describes may very well represent a black male lying bloody and trapped in the wood. Such a view is strengthened by the repeated references to blood, the trees that conjure up visions of the hangman, harvest reapers with blood on their hands.

During the late thirties Hayden’s proletarian-protest works caught the attention of officials of the United Auto Workers Union, who asked him to read at an organizational rally of a UAW local in Detroit. His verse so impressed the group that they proclaimed him the “People’s Poet.” His participation was not without a real element of danger. The city was divided into warring elements— capital against labor, white against black. It was not a war of rhetoric alone, as news items of the period in Detroit and New York papers indicate. The Ku Klux Klan, the Black Legion, and other white supremacist groups, supported by a sympathetic police force, repeatedly perpetrated acts of raw violence against blacks and others who actively supported [Page 23] union organization.

Hayden was then writing drama and radio scripts. One, a social protest one-act play titled “Many Mansions,” treated the housing situation for blacks in Detroit. Making use of the Biblical theme explicit in the title, he drew his plot from the infamous Sweet case that had shaken the Afro-American national community in the twenties. The cast was made up of whites as well as blacks, and in its denouement the play had blacks and whites working together toward a solution. It is ironic that Hayden was scathingly criticized in the black press for “airing . . . [our] dirty linen,” a reaction easily understood in the light of the audience’s desperate middle-class pretentiousness. He said he published a reply affirming his determination not to be an escapist and proclaiming his intention to deal with social issues.

The Decisive Years: 1940-1946

AS THE DECADE of the 1940s began, the Detroit Project was being phased out, and Hayden found employment on the Michigan Chronicle as rewrite man and music and drama critic. The job helped him maintain his ties with the fine arts but did not help his financial situation much, for his salary was a subsistence-level six dollars per week.

His first important decision of this period was to marry, which he did, though not without opposition from his prospective in-laws, who raised objections to his East Side ghetto origin, his fundamentalist Baptist background, and his poverty. The fact that he had to borrow fifty dollars from Mr. Hayden to pay expenses connected with the wedding probably did not serve as much of a recommendation. The publication of Heart Shape in the Dust in 1940, however, impressed his fiancée’s parents sufficiently to dispel their middle class, West Side, Episcopalian reservations, and they gave their consent for their lovely, talented daughter to marry him.

Erma Inez Morris was an ambitious woman, a concert pianist and a music teacher. Her elders and peers, as well as her parents, considered her too good for Hayden. Nonetheless, they were married in June of 1940. From this union, which lasted until his death, one child, Maia, a daughter, was born.

Unpleasant gossip and censure of Hayden’s lack of financial security shortened the couple’s stay in Detroit to only one year. Their first effort to flee was in the summer of 1941. They stored their belongings with friends and spent the summer in New York City. It was a period when Hayden began his lifelong enchantment with that city as well as his use of its offerings for the promotion of his art. He spent much of his time in research for materials on “Middle Passage” at the New York City Public Library Schomburg Collection. Meanwhile, Erma studied the piano at Juilliard and was sometimes the accompanist for the Talley David Dance Company. Erma’s earnings supplemented the meager funds they had been able to accumulate from her salary as a school teacher and from Hayden’s as a journalist for the Michigan Chronicle.

[Page 24] When Hayden left New York City in the fall, it was to travel to Ann Arbor to resume graduate studies that he had begun in 1938 at the University of Michigan. Erma, who wanted him to be a success, found a teaching post in Detroit to earn a livelihood and commuted to Ann Arbor. Soon he was awarded a teaching assistantship, which helped to support him. The couple was even able to “get a small house.” In 1942 Maia was born.

Because he had left Detroit City College short of one credit hour and, therefore, without a degree, he was not allowed official matriculation in the University. The situation was corrected, however, and he was awarded his degree, when he notified officials at Wayne State of his provisional acceptance at the University of Michigan. The fact that he had published a volume of poetry and had two First Prize Jules-Avery Hopwood Awards to his name probably militated in his favor.

Hayden did not continue his undergraduate Spanish major at the University; he majored, rather, in English and Continued his association with aspiring writers. He met John Ciardi and Arthur Miller at the University. He recalled that he played a part in a production of Miller’s play The Great Disobedience and that when Miller left for New York City Hayden “had the nerve to wish him good luck.”

Of much more significance, however, was the opportunity, in 1941, to participate in a class taught by W. H. Auden.

The return to the University and enrollment in the Auden poetry class occurred at a crucial point in the development of Hayden’s career as a poet. This was a time when political disillusionment might have silenced him as it silenced many members of his generation. He had responded psychologically as well as artistically to the failure of government to ameliorate the plight of black Americans, and he had become disillusioned likewise with the Communist Party. The Great Depression was being eased by social reforms and the prosperity of a war-time economy. Civil Rights gains fired the hopes of millions of Afro-Americans. A literature of protest no longer seemed necessary. Consequently, the members of the Depression generation either faded into silence, took up other pursuits, or left the country.

As Auden’s student, Hayden broadened his perspective in a way that discouraged complete identification with black writing; certainly, he strengthened his ties to the general literary currents of the time. Moreover, through Auden, who was a recent English expatriate, he benefited from the contemporary European literary cross-current. During his formative years Auden had been influenced by Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot. In England, during the thirties, he was the principal poet in a group of socialist writers that included Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender—poets Hayden read as a graduate student at the University of Michigan. However, Auden had come to repudiate his political position before he taught Hayden.

Perhaps Auden’s most valuable contribution to Hayden was a view of poetry that led away from racial and political rhetoric, [Page 25] from the belief in poetry as direct statement to the view that poetry is best when it is oblique, conceptual—a view that give him a sense of direction that other black protest poets did not find. Hayden recalled that once, when he gave Auden two poems to examine, he rejected one with the comment that it was like arithmetic and preferred the other because it was like algebra. Auden makes this analogy clear in his essay “The Virgin and the Dynamo,” which includes the idea that algebra deals with concepts and exists as potential on the poetic level of raw experience, whereas arithmetic deals with the positive, the routinely demonstrable.

Although Hayden made no mention of it, techniques for creating the kind of poetry Auden preferred probably were the concerns of the poetry class. Auden’s promotion of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ prosody, his own demonstration of multiple techniques in a variety of verse forms, and his experiments with off-rhymes probably were some of the details the class studied. Hayden reluctantly indicated that about the time he came under Auden’s influence he wrote “Frederick Douglass,” demonstrably a Hopkinsean sonnet. Moreover, whether the influence was direct, subsequent to his class with Auden, Hayden’s poetry made frequent use of off-rhyme. It was probably Auden who introduced Hayden to other contemporary European poets as well.

The poetic philosophy Auden expressed in his caution to Hayden (to avoid racial and political rhetoric) is treated in his “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” where he defines his concept of art and the poet’s role. Written, of course, after his period as a social poet, the elegy makes two points: that poetry is inconsequential in advancing social causes because the interpretation posterity will give it is uncontrollable, and that the real value of art is that it can “teach the free man how to praise”—that is, how to begin to value order above disorder, even though the order is artistic rather than political.

Yeats was likewise a crucial influence on the maturing Hayden. Of the Irish poet’s impact on him, Hayden remarked, “It is Yeats’s ability to handle the Irish question of nationalism without propagandizing” that impressed him. It is evident, too, that Yeats exercised a thematic influence on Hayden. For example, in title and theme “‘Lear is Gay’” continues to explore the poetic materials of Yeats’ “Lapis Lazuli.” Furthermore, in “Kodachromes of the Island,” dedicating himself to the plight of the oppressed and alluding to Yeats’ “The Circus Animal’s Desertion,” Hayden pays a significant tribute to the Irish poet:

. . . I roamed

the cobbled island,

and thought of Yeats,

his passionate search for

a theme. Sought mine.

In The Night-Blooming Cereus Hayden’s commitment to Classic philosophy, as treated in Plato’s “Parable of the Cave” parallels Yeats’ Neoplatonism to the extent that it promulgates the doctrine that the real world behind the everyday material world can be reached only by the imagination. One critic goes so far as to imply that Hayden’s “verbal dexterity” [Page 26] is directly attributable to the influence of Yeats.

Whether Auden introduced Hayden to Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Rainer Maria Rilke is not clear. In his interview with McClusky, Hayden mentioned reading Auden, Spender, and Lewis at about the same period. Hayden said he was impressed with their “trenchancy of phrase . . . imagery-daring which opened up new vistas for [him].” It was at that stage of his poetic development, too, when he had become critical of those poets whose verse was “synonymous with propaganda.”

Concerning Hayden’s link to Rilke, it is not improbable that Auden led him to Spender, who translated Rilke into English. In any case, Hayden’s “Dance the Orange” owes its title and theme to Rilke’s “Sonnet 15.”

Meanwhile, having got her husband back into graduate school, Mrs. Hayden—assured of his intellectual opportunities as well of as a certain measure of financial security— turned her attention to his spiritual well-being. She had been born and raised in an Episcopalian family, but she had chosen to become a Bahá’í. Thus it was the Bahá’í Faith to which she introduced her husband. Although Hayden’s decision to convert to her Faith was neither hasty not easy, by 1943 he had read the literature she offered him and decided to become a Bahá’í. A serious commitment, it had a lasting effect on the philosophical direction of his thought and thus on his poetry as well.

Hayden became a Bahá’í, he said, for several reasons: the belief in progressive revelation (that is, revelation that is not limited historically to the appearance of a unique prophet, but rather is augmented by the insights of a succession of great religious figures, the latest of whom is Bahá’u’lláh); the belief that the Bahá’í World Order could effect the relationship between religious thought and scientific discovery necessary to a unified physical and metaphysical outlook; and, most important, the belief in the transcendentalist principle of universal brotherhood. The Bahá’í Faith, as a basic principle, recognizes no bounds of race, creed, or color, and unlike Communism, offers the added comfort of a religious sanction.

Hayden’s conversion may indeed have been an inversion of the old concerns that motivated his interest in Communism, as well as [Page 27] a response to the disillusionment with its failure to build one world, one people. The Bahá’í Faith presented the opportunity to participate in “the long hard struggle toward freedom,” in a matrix where “freedom” becomes a generic term describing a universal necessity. Thus the struggle of the Afro-American becomes a symbol of the larger yearning and struggle that have developed through the ages.

David Galler observes that Hayden’s quest for solace and purpose in religion was a “turn a white man would not take.” This statement is made without further clarification, and I can only assume that he failed to recognize Hayden’s conversion as part of a trend that whites had begun. T. S. Eliot embraced Anglo-Catholicism in the twenties, as Auden did in the thirties. Hayden, in 1943, anticipated what Stephenchev notes as concern for other-worldliness in the fifties, resulting in poets’ becoming Zen Buddhists, Roman Catholics, Jungians, Black Muslims, and so on, and what Robert E. Spiller elsewhere calls a search for love.

In 1946 Hayden was preparing to leave his home state. He would take with him a philosophical confidence rooted in the Bahá’í Faith and the experience of having studied with Auden, who influenced him in the belief that art was a concern more timeless than race or social condition. It should be noted, however, that while certain white poets were cognizant of his worth Hayden was not able to move quickly toward the public stature of his white contemporaries. Whatever optimism he derived from his Bahá’í beliefs, and whatever white poets recognized the quality of his work, for the establishment the artist himself was still the wrong color.

The Pilgrimage Years: 1946-1969

WHEN Hayden left the University of Michigan, he had reason to believe that his Master’s degree, his teaching experience, and his publications would constitute considerable bargaining chips in securing an estimable position. He was, indeed, informally led to believe, when he was hired by Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, that he would fill the Writer-in-Residence position. He did, but his actual duties turned out, for the most part, to be those of an overloaded English instructor assigned a teaching load of fifteen to sixteen hours. Under such conditions his creative writing class (in which he helped to develop several important writers) was the one saving grace of his new position. As if the workload were not enough, the Fisk of those days, as Julius Lester, one of his students, puts it, was a “miasma of black bourgeoisie gentility,” which Hayden indicted as a stronghold of pre-civil-rights-legislation satisfaction with the status quo.

Hayden, however, was not about to accept the status quo. Within two years of his arrival at the University, he had articulated his new literary and political position. He hecame the guiding spirit of a group of young writers including William Demby, a World War II veteran and a student in Hayden’s writing class; Myron O’Higgins, a visiting research consultant at the University; and Ben Johnson, also a veteran and one of his creative writing students. With Demby and the others, he developed a polemic that they privately published as the first of a series planned to attack what the group felt to be discriminatory practices of the white literary [Page 28] establishment. “Counterpoise 3,” published in 1948, is a position statement setting out four points critical of both the Nationalist School of black writers and the white publishing world. In essence these points are (1) opposition to “the chauvinistic, the cultish, . . . [and] special pleading”; (2) support and encouragement for the “experimental and the unconventional in writing, music and the graphic arts”; (3) opposition to criticism of their works “entirely in the light of sociology and politics”; (4) opposition to “criticism of their works by coterie editors, reviewers and anthologists who . . . refuse encouragement or critical guidance because [their work dealt] with realities.” The manifesto avows belief in the humanistic and spiritual value of poetry and concludes, “We believe in the oneness of mankind and the importance of the arts in the struggle for peace and unity.”

This declaration of literary independence indicates a position from which Hayden did not swerve from that day—a position that Black Nationalists in 1966 were to find objectionable because of its rejection of a social-racial concept of artistic values.

Yet another influence on Hayden’s poetic philosophy is evident in the statement, “We believe in the oneness of mankind. . . .” This declaration is a restatement of Bahá’u’lláh’s and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s principles concerning the unity of the human race, the artist’s role, and the function of his work: “Of the Tree of Knowledge the All-glorious fruit is this exalted word: Of one Tree are all ye the fruits and of one Bough the leaves.” “In the Bahá’í Cause arts, sciences and all crafts are counted as worship.”

Immediately after “Counterpoise 3,” Hayden began to apply its philosophic principles in The Lion and the Archer, written in collaboration with Myron O’Higgins. Taking literary cues from the poets mentioned previously, and from the French surrealists and the Baroque poets, Hayden created an ensemble of six poems that vividly evoke, in nondidactic terms, the nightmare world he perceived. He followed this brochure with another, Figure of Time, which continued his new literary techniques and introduced both his nostalgic poems and his Bahá’í poems. In the early sixties, no doubt still disenchanted with American publishers, he turned to a European house, Paul Breman, for publication of his award-winning A Ballad of Remembrance, and only after twenty-six years had passed did he again locate an American firm, October House, for publication of his Selected Poems.

While Hayden was gaining recognition for himself as a poet, he was increasing his knowledge of the Deep South. A few months before Hayden began his tenure at Fisk, William Dean Pickens of the U.S. Treasury Department wrote and asked Hayden to participate with other writers in a U.S. bond rally in New Orleans. In addition to the opportunity it gave him to see that historic city, his trip, undertaken for a patriotic cause, ironically brought him face to face with racial prejudice—open and abrasive segregation in a coffee shop. That traumatic incident in New Orleans was followed by another when, in 1951, accompanied by his friend and Fisk colleague, Arna Bontemps, he journeyed by auto to Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi, to participate with other well-known Afro-American writers in a literary festival celebrating the College’s seventy-fifth anniversary. When they stopped at a gasoline station, he experienced what he felt was an atmosphere of latent racism. In time he recorded these experiences in his [Page 29] arresting poems “A Ballad of Remembrance” and “Tour 5.” These experiences, between 1946 and 1951, in the heartland of the Deep South, heightened his perception of black-white dynamics, both historic and contemporary, and informed the brilliant series of poems about the pre-Civil Rights legislation South that he began in The Lion and the Archer.

During the middle fifties Hayden had an opportunity to gain new experiences with the economically oppressed when, through the sponsorship of Dr. Charles S. Johnson, he was awarded a Ford Foundation grant for travel and writing in Mexico. The grant enabled Hayden to sojourn in Mexico for several months in 1954 and several more months in 1955. Thus he learned at first hand about the plight of the Mexican peon. His experiences provided the background for the Mexican poems that he wrote between 1955 and 1962 and included in A Ballad of Remembrance, published in 1962.

Meanwhile, during the fifties, Hayden was bereaved by the death of his natural parents and was made even more insecure by trying to decide whether he was Asa Sheffey or Robert Hayden. More than a decade earlier he had lost both of his adoptive parents. Mrs. Sue Ellen Hayden in 1941 and “Pa” Hayden in 1938, with whom he lived until they died. Somewhere between 1950 and 1955 (exact date unknown) he lost his natural father. But it was in 1957, when his natural mother died, that he suffered his most traumatic loss. Before her death and free of the Haydens’ presence, he enjoyed a close relationship with her. It was a relationship in which she irrevocably secured his kinship and artistic ties to her family and to her forebears. She convinced him that the Haydens did not legally adopt him, and she declared that his true name, the name she and his father gave him, was Asa Sheffey. It was the name he wished legally to adopt.

Burdened by the bereavement and disquietude he suffered in his private life during the fifties, Hayden experienced an even more unsettling new decade. Just as his private crises had taken their toll on his sense of personal well-being, so did the social upheavals of the sixties wreak havoc on his professional security. Indeed, the very nature of his dual professions as poet and professor of English in a leading black university made his positions vulnerable. It was a black college, the Agricultural and Technical College of Greensboro, North Carolina, that nurtured the spirit of revolutionary civil rights protest in four students who began the wave of sit-in demonstrations that swept the South and the North. Also, it was at certain black colleges and universities that Black Nationalists publicized their political views and strategies for black writers. By the mid-sixties that “bastion of middle-class respectability,” Fisk University, no longer offered Hayden security, and as poet and teacher he was attacked as never before.

The year 1966 was a year of extremes. On the one hand, Hayden was accorded important approbation from his admirers: at the First Negro Festival of Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in international competition, he won the Grand Prix de la Poésie; his poetry was being published in important little magazines and was being noticed in important American literary circles; and his latest volume, Selected Poems, was just off the press and was reviewed in Poetry.

On the other hand, he was severely attacked by a group of militant Black Nationalists who had convened at Fisk University for the First Black Writers’ Conference. Having achieved some status in American and international literary circles, he incurred the active displeasure (and perhaps jealousy) of the black militants who raised the political [Page 30] issue of the black writer’s role during the “searing sixties.” They espoused the Maoist-inspired philosophy, decreed by Ron Karenga and other Black Nationalists, that black literature should be didactic and propagandistic for the purpose of indoctrinating the masses in their revolutionary cause.

When Hayden resolutely held to the artistic position he avowed in “Counterpoise 3,” they countered with a new attack: they censured his longstanding refusal to be categorized as a black poet. Again Hayden, having found a place and a voice in the grander cause of world building that the Bahá’í Faith afforded, refused to capitulate. As he saw it, his refusal to be categorized as a black poet was not a rejection of his biological inheritance or of the black struggle but was rather a refusal to be restricted in subject matter to “race” or to be identified with second-class craftsmanship. In adhering, at this time, to his stand to be “unalterably opposed to the chauvinistic, the cultish and to special pleading,” he made a final turn away from jingoism and propagandistic didacticism.

Contributing to Hayden’s role in the confrontation was the fact that his maturation took place during the 1930s and 1940s when the growing assumption was that the Afro-American writer could and would be merged into American literary life, losing the pejorative aspects of the literary identity that had been assigned to him. He said, “My generation was working hard for acceptance as writers, as artists and not as writers with a particular identity.” Indeed, he had achieved enough status in places where it counted to have reason to believe he was a part of the literary mainstream.

The militants were responding to the disappointing fate of the Supreme Court Civil Rights decisions of the forties and fifties and the generally slow progress (or seeming non-progress) of integration as a means of ensuring Constitutional freedoms. Hayden, shaped by the forces of the integrationist thirties, forties, and fifties, was understandably reassured by the new Civil Rights laws. But the Black Nationalists and the new generation of Afro-American writers pointed to the indefinite timetable the Court had set for implementation of the laws and the South’s delaying tactics. In their view, integration, if it were to be accomplished, would become a mere merging of blacks into the polluted stream of American life.

Confusing artistic aims with political activism, they espoused political separatism and encouraged the rejection of traditional aesthetics and literary standards as monuments of a degenerate, racist culture. It was this artistically naive failure to recognize the necessity of individual integrity, demanding that the artist subordinate his creative talents and perceptions to the sociopolitical goals of the group, that Hayden would not condone. But Hayden, too, “had misgivings about the Civil Rights Laws.” He had a difference in method and did not feel that bigotry was going to get rid of bigotry.

He had felt himself beleaguered at Fisk even before the time of the conference. From the time of his arrival he had been ostensibly the Writer-in-Residence; but the University had seen fit to appoint the novelist John O. Killens to what Hayden had been given to understand was his own official post. That Killens organized the 1966 Conference must have seemed the unkindest cut of all. Killens was also responsible for a series of conferences that followed. Hayden, though he was invited, did not choose to attend.

[Page 31] Julius Lester, who saw Hayden shortly after these events, says that the immediate response was a verbal tirade against the Black Nationalists. His rage is understandable, as is the sorrow he felt. He had been the admired literary “father” of the young black writers at Fisk from the days when he had inspired and coauthored the Counterpoise series. He realized that having been identified as an “Uncle Tom,” he would not see those days again. He had to live with the knowledge that a group of people whose heritage he shared, and indeed had celebrated powerfully in poem after poem, were attacking him simply because he believed that any artist should feel free to approach his materials as a man of unique sensibility and a craftsman of integrity. The events of 1966 were such an emotional trial that it was four years before he could give them objective poetic consideration.

Meanwhile, however, his stature as a poet and the demand for his poetry was growing impressively. In 1967 he recorded his poems for the Library of Congress and was Poet-in-Residence at Indiana State University. In 1968 he was made poetry editor of World Order, the official literary organ of the Bahá’í Faith in the United States. In 1969 he was awarded the Detroit Mayor’s Bronze Medal for distinguished achievement by a native scholar. In the same year he became Bingham Professor at the University of Louisville and Visiting Poet at the University of Washington and had an offer of a permanent post at the University of Louisville. All of this gave him the leverage that helped him get, in 1969, a post at the University of Michigan, where he remained until his death.

During this period he published three volumes of poems. Words in the Mourning Time (1970) is a cathartic work, his poetic response to the Fisk confrontation with the black militants, an affirmation of his humanism, and the rejection of what he saw as evil. It is not too difficult to see what his “abstractions” are and who are the evil doers in his title poem:

We must not be frightened nor cajoled

into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.

We must go on struggling to be human,

though monsters of abstraction

police and threaten us.

Having achieved his catharsis he followed it, two years later, with The Night-Blooming Cereus (1972), a slender volume of eight new poems, but nonetheless his second pivotal work, both in terms of subject matter and style. In the work Hayden turns almost exclusive attention to the problems of reality, vis-à-vis appearance, and the meaning of art and life. In beginning the volume he writes:

But I can see none of it clearly, for

it all takes place in semi-dark.

A scene one might recall

falling asleep.

Hayden announces in lines that are reminiscent of Plato’s Parable of the Cave an interest in the philosophic significance of his past. In the closing poem he pointedly makes clear his assessment of the past in an allusion to the Platonic idea of the unsubstantiality of the world:

Looking back, we cannot see,

except for its blurring lights

like underwater stars and moons,

our starting-place.

Behind us, beyond us now

is phantom territory, a world

abstract as memories of earth

the traveling dead take home.

Between obscuring cloud

and cloud, the cloudy dark

ensphering us seems all we can

be certain of. Is Plato’s Cave.

Except for one literary allusion to Watts, [Page 32] linked with Hiroshima and My Lai, in “The Peacock Room,” Hayden does not treat in The Night-Blooming Cereus the Afro-American themes that had been, until 1972, his forte. Obviously, the slender book is the product of the poet grown old, as he puts it, who tries to see the meaning of his life clearly.

In 1973 Hayden discussed a new volume on which he was then still at work. He had already decided that he would call it Angle of Ascent, and he had a good idea of what poems he would include, but be complained that, notwithstanding his past poetic accomplishments, he was having difficulty obtaining a publisher.

He commented on a poem he called “Ancestors,” describing it as a composite based on stories his mother told him about his grandfather and other men in her family. He observed that this source was one on which he expected to continue drawing. As the poem finally appeared in Angle of Ascent, it was greatly expanded and retitled “Beginnings.”

Earlier, he discussed “For a Young Artist,” another poem that appears in the title section. He wrote it, he said, in tribute to a young Chilean artist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose work he found interesting. At the time he had been discussing his use of surrealism that, he said, helped him in the development of fresh and effective images. He said he was also impressed with José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night. Both poems are important; “Beginnings” reveals Hayden’s deep concern with his family roots and his need to establish his identity. “To a Young Artist” proclaims his most definitive and conclusive thoughts about the role of the artist, and it reveals the extent to which Hayden was influenced by the South American writers.

The volume was published almost simultaneously with Hayden’s election for “distinguished poetic achievement” as the 1975 Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. Noting this accomplishment in his review of the book, Michael S. Harper observes that it was a long time coming. He then devotes his attention, almost exclusively, to the poetry that he sees as best capturing “the Afro-American tradition of the black hero.” He praises Hayden as a master conversationalist and handler of idiom and characterizes him as a “poet of perfect pitch.” His overall assessment of the new volume supports the validity of the distinguished award.

In 1978 Hayden published both paperback and cased editions of American Journal. The limited elegantly executed volume of thirteen poems affirms Hayden’s commitment to Afro-American history subject matter, makes good his promise to mine his memories of the Detroit ghetto and people, where and with whom he spent very nearly the first three decades of his life, and continues his penchant for the romantic, the exotic.

By the end of 1979 Hayden had completed a new volume that he said would include the American Journal collection as well as new poems. He said it would be published by Liveright in 1980. It is a volume that raises Hayden’s productivity for the decade of the seventies to four volumes, an output that he had not heretofore attained. This volume, destined to be his last, was to have been published posthumously in August 1980, five months after his death 25 February 1980.

Indeed, the seventies proved to be the most rewarding decade of Hayden’s career, not only artistically, but professionally and financially. In 1975 he learned that he was to be Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress [Page 33] for the 1976-77 term. It was an appointment that virtually made him “poet laureate” of the United States. He was reappointed to serve the 1977-78 term, also an unprecedented honor for an Afro-American. His was “a role in the community . . . [there],” William Meridith wrote, “. . . that may have brought his public usefulness to its greatest fulfillment.” Arthur P. Davis added that it was an appointment he filled with “distinction and graciousness” and to which he brought “dignity . . . understanding, rapport with community and nation seldom found in such offices.” Hayden himself said he was making an effort to give unknown writers, black as well as white, needed exposure.

Concurrently with his association with the Library of Congress, academia showered him with its highest recognition. Four institutions of higher learning conferred on him the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Degree. He was honored by the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Michigan Foundation for the Arts. Unlike the prophet without honor in his own home, Hayden was accorded a certain amount of honor by the city of Detroit.

Numerous readings at art centers, colleges, and universities throughout the nation, most of which Hayden gave during the 1970s, served to widen and deepen his influence. That he planned to continue these endeavors was made evident by his acceptance of the invitation to read at Fordham University on 15 April 1980. On another level, the many anthologies including The United States in Literature, which bear the imprint of his editorship, make evident the strength of his insight and guidance of American and Afro-American literature.

These attainments, unfortunately, were accompanied by the poet’s failing health. In 1977 Hayden said he had had a nervous breakdown. In 1978 he was anticipating, with some misgivings, an operation for cataracts and was involved in an automobile collision in which he suffered various contusions. In February 1979, very distraught, he revealed that he had cancer. Later that month, he said, eschewing chemotherapy, he would undergo holistic medicine. The University gave him the services of a part-time secretary, and he said on 7 April 1979 that he was “putting his papers and affairs in order.” However, later that year he wrote and mentioned his Fordham University reading. By 24 February 1980, “suffering from influenza, he was too ill to attend a testimonial that was held in his honor at the University of Michigan.” One day later, 25 February, he died.

[Page 34] Before his death Robert Hayden submitted to his publisher what he knew would be his last volume of poetry. The book, soon to be published by Liveright, is almost certain to suggest the poet’s “transcendence” into that mystical starlike state that he poeticized in “Stars,” a state from which he will be lighting the way for those not yet so advanced.

[Page 35]

Toward the Silence

For poets,

words

grow

in darkness

toward the silence

of light.

the door opens telling them there is more than one way—

more than one room.

Your composure was filled with the knowledge of entrances

yet ever-mindful of a singular exit.

You, a poet Samson

you were a man near blind, clasping metaphors that give “sight”

—Vision.

When we first met you, it was Winter.

You seemed to hate the snow that made all things one color,

one texture,

one bitter cold feeling, and you were a modern Ahab

fighting an ancient whale.

So, you spoke of the whiteness that had caused the taxi to lose

its way in the city sea, and this day, you were late to class.

still we waited. Still, we waited to learn.

And it was in February, with Spring approaching, that you left us—

not Winter, not Fall, nor Summer. Spring.

A new world order emerges when death becomes a call forging order. Order that is mine.

And, it was that first Winter—I watched you place hands in Hayden pockets to

keep warm, and you gave us your prophecy:

*the reasons for poetry: life! and to hold the deaf until they hear the word “Love.”

*there is no speech barrier, only a people grown hard of hearing—a people with no hands and useless eyes . . . “Non-believers.”

*Poetry, like life, is mystery, but mystery that cannot loose all ties, all links to existence—to our being. Symbol was not enough to join Winter to Spring, “Non-believers” need more . . .

and through the cold, the confusion—

we learned. We learned that out past—hidden

in death’s numberless cries of a middle passage

was not just ours, but every being’s—

our heritage was theirs also, and so you said:

A new world order would come when our death

became the call forging Universal Order.

[Page 36]

Now it is Spring, and I have become a Lady of the Subway.

riding trains is not my hobby; it’s my life, and the words

you left me

have become a ray of sun

light. They keep Winter away.

And today

this lady of the subway thinks of you and watches

broken fragments of passing life moving toward the silence, to learn

that death is not a future stop

nor, like these faces,

a lasting impression.

and sometimes,

sometimes memory is enough.

poet man,

teaching us to know the meaning more

than the worship of the “word.”

You,

knew painful silence,

and a shade full of beauty.

You,

left us at Springtime, and the earth puts on a new garment

with your passing. So,

We

watch the memory of your being,

ever wary of a peculiar ascent—

an angle of vision

pulsating warmth.

you, who came to us in Winter, left in Spring, not Fall, nor Summer.

Spring.

Yes, of you

the memory is enough to bridge Winter to Spring.

Feeling your presence still, and yes, memory is enough—

this time,

memory

is

enough.

—Donna Denizé

Copyright © 1981 by Donna Denizé

[Page 37]

The Bahá’í Muse: Religion in Robert Hayden’s Poetry

BY GERALD PARKS

Copyright © 1981 by Gerald Parks. This paper was delivered at the annual conference of the International Society for Contemporary Literature and Theater, held in Bruges, Belgium, in July 1980. It will form one chapter of a book on which the author is working.

WHEN one is confronted with a new author, it is legitimate to ask why one should trouble to read him. By “new” here I mean simply unfamiliar to the reader. If the purpose of reading is to acquire new knowledge or insights or have new experiences—that is, to feel new feelings or to feel old ones in unfamiliar ways, in short, to expand the range of one’s intellect and emotions—it is only common sense to ask what kind of enrichment of experience a new author is likely to give. No author, old or new, is likely to stimulate interest for long if there is nothing peculiarly his in his work that differentiates it clearly and distinctly from all other work in a similar form or on a similar theme. What is unique about an author is what is called his “originality” and is in no way incompatible with adherence to a tradition.

So much may seem obvious. But originality is easy to spot in the case of macroscopic deviations from established form, as in the case of Whitman. It is far harder to pinpoint in work of high quality that, formally, seems to conform to contemporary poetic practice without deviation. This was my situation, years ago, on first reading the poetry of Robert Hayden. I realized that I was in the presence of a fine spirit and an able poet, a master of his craft. I was not yet aware of the quality that made him truly outstanding.

That quality is, I suggest, nothing less than the careful and precise exploration, in verse, of great artistry and resonance, of a unique sensibility, unlike any in earlier American letters. It is a sensibility that combines in a rare synthesis the four main existential “problems” of Hayden’s life: religion, sex, blackness, and art. These four components may be regarded for our purposes as all equally important. They are all sources of tension. Moreover, they create further tension by their interaction: the professed morality conflicts with the sexual tensions; the religious and social ideology is at odds with black political action; and so on. Only art succeeds in creating a fragile balance.

The element that seems to cause the most tension is religion; hence one would expect it to call forth ambivalent reactions. Likewise, it may well be a source of creative energy. I here propose, therefore, to explore the thematic development in Hayden’s treatment of religion.

[Page 38] Such treatment may be explicit or implicit. It is explicit in a number of poems that are almost propaganda pieces, or would be if they were not fine poems: “Bahá’u’lláh in the Garden of Ridwan,” “‘From the Corpse Woodpiles, from the Ashes,’” “Dawnbreaker,” “and all the atoms cry aloud.” It is, however, implicit in a number of others, such as “The Night-Blooming Cereus” and the entire sequence “Words in the Mourning Time.” I would suggest, in fact, that Hayden’s poetry cannot be understood except by reference to his religious attitudes. Since for all his mature life those attitudes involved active adherence to the Bahá’í Faith, it is no exaggeration to say that some knowledge of the Bahá’í Faith is essential to an appreciation of his work.

There are signs that Hayden was attracted to religion even as a child—to the Protestantism of his youth in Detroit. Religion seems to have been an ever-present part of his childhood life, as witnessed in such poems as “‘Summertime and the Living . . .’”:

. . . Feels their Mosaic eyes

upon him, though the florist roses

that only sorrow could afford

long since have bidden them Godspeed.

Oh, summer summer summertime—

Then grim street preachers shook

their tambourines and Bibles in the face

of tolerant wickedness; . . .

or “‘The Burly Fading One’”:

Coal miner, stevedore and railroad man,

oh how he brawls and loves,

a Bible over his headlong heart

and no liquor on his breath.

or “Belsen, Day of Liberation”:

And because that day was a holy day

when even the dead, it seemed,

must rise, she was allowed to stay

and see the golden strangers who

Were Father, Brother, and her dream

of God. . . .

or “Free Fantasia: Tiger Flowers”:

[Page 39]

Hardshell believers

amen’d the wreck

as God A’mighty’s

will. . . .

In all these poems religion is present not only as an experience but also, and more important, as a moral force, determining or at least affecting one’s attitude toward “wickedness,” “liquor,” death and defeat, even manhood and life itself. Yet a certain ambivalence or doubting note appears in these childhood reminiscences. For example, in “Free Fantasia” Hayden is careful to distinguish himself from the “hardshell believers”:

. . . I’d thought

such gaiety could not

die. Nor could our

elegant avenger.

This is a much later poem than any of the others so far quoted, but even in the earlier poems the overtones of religion are not unambiguous. In “The Rabbi” the rabbi has a sinister air:

Where I grew up, I used to see

the rabbi, dour and pale

in religion’s mourner clothes,

walking to the synagogue.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The rabbi bore my friends off

in his prayer shawl.

He seems, in fact, to be a witch, kidnapping the poet’s friends. In “Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves” a mystical insight is heavily intertwined with an awkward sexuality:

So here I am, so here I am,

fake mammy to God’s mistakes.

And that’s the beauty part,

I mean, ain’t that the beauty part.

In “Witch Doctor” blackness, sexuality, and religion are fused in an ironic, brilliant, and cruel portrait of religion gone mad, a “flock in theopathic tension” before this

. . . fervid juba of God as lover, healer,

conjurer. And of himself as God.

[Page 40] This, as Hayden writes in “Locus,” is

. . . the past—

soulscape, Old Testament battleground

of warring shades whose weapons kill.

It should be emphasized that in none of these poems is the religious element forced or dragged in to add color or significance (in fact, it is often low-key, almost casual); rather, it is a natural consequence of a world view for which God is as much a real character as the flesh-and-blood creatures to whom we say hello every day.

Religious imagery is also significantly present in Hayden’s narratives (“The Ballad of Nat Turner,” “Middle Passage,” “Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday,” “Night, Death, Mississippi,” “The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield,” “The Dream”). It is difficult, in fact, to find a poem in which reference to God or religion is not made. This alone is an extraordinary fact and enough to set Hayden apart from other contemporary men of letters. Hayden seems incapable of seeing nature, for example, as other than a symbol, as in “October”:

October—

its plangency, its glow

as of words in

the poet’s mind,

as of God in

the saint’s.

Or in the “Mountains” section of “‘An Inference of Mexico’”:

Their surging darkness

drums bells gongs imploring a god.

Certain words seems always to have a symbolic, spiritual meaning, reflecting an underlying religious attitude. The word “dark” is one of these, almost always indicating darkness of soul, as it does in “Approximations”:

Darkness, darkness.

I grope and falter. Flare

of a match.

The word “star” is another carrying symbolic, spiritual meaning. It receives its fullest treatment in the poem “Stars,” which is clearly based on Bahá’í imagery (especially the Nine-Pointed Star).

The pervasiveness of religious themes and imagery leads one to ask just what [Page 41] precisely is the function of religion in Hayden’s intellectual development and view of the universe. The answer would seem to be that it, and especially the message of Bahá’u’lláh, is the end of man’s “quest for meaning,” a quest that is both personal and social and that is described in the poem “and all the atoms cry aloud” as “disastrous,” presumably because it has ignored the message of God for this day in going its wicked way through war and injustice. Yet there is a sense in which this “disastrous quest / for meaning” is “process, major means whereby, / oh dreadfully, our humanness must be achieved” (“Words in the Mourning Time”). Here the reader who has not read Shoghi Effendi’s The Promised Day Is Come may be at a bit of a loss to understand what Hayden means. Briefly, the idea is that the world’s terrible suffering is necessary to give birth to a new world order. The ultimate aim is the attainment of a new human dimension, a personal as well as a social salvation:

Reclaim now, now renew the vision of

a human world where godliness

is possible and man

is neither gook nigger honkey wop nor kike

but man

permitted to be man.

The Bahá’í Faith, then, slakes the world’s and the poet’s thirst for an answer to the riddle of life (but is the riddle necessary? “Sphinx” would seem to imply that it is not: “it is possible to live without / my joke and me.”) It also fulfills Hayden’s search for a theme.

Alien, at home—as always

everywhere—I roamed

the cobbled island,

and thought of Yeats,

his passionate search for

a theme. Sought mine.

“Kodachromes of the Island”

Hayden’s theme, which dominates his entire corpus, is announced in “Theme and Variation”: all things alter and

. . . become a something more,

a something less. Are the revelling shadows

of a changing permanence.

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There is, there is, he said, an imminence

that turns to curiosa all I know;

that changes light to rainbow darkness

wherein God waylays us and empowers.

This theme of the imminent spiritual meaning of things is treated with great skill and virtuosity and from a variety of points of view, ranging from enthusiastic acceptance to ambivalence to open doubt. But even in his doubt Hayden’s reality is symbolic of other realms.

One of his most moving poems, “The Broken Dark,” traces the shift from doubt to acceptance. In it the hospital room becomes a purgatory, and his disease, a spiritual uneasiness. Hayden’s imagination is so trained to metaphor that all reality is naturally seen as symbolic; even the first sentence, which at first might seem merely realistic, soon turns into a spiritual landscape:

Sleepless, I stare

from the dark hospital room

at shadows of a flower and its leaves

the nightlight fixes like a blotto

on the corridor wall. Shadow-plays

of Bali—demons move to the left,

gods, in their frangipani crowns

and gold, to the right.

The darkness of the room corresponds to the poet’s doubting state of mind; moreover, it is the darkness that creates the shadow-plays on the wall, that suggests the various gods and demons. By association of ideas the tremendous question follows; it receives an answer echoing Macbeth.

Ah and my life

in the shadow of God’s laser light—

shadow of deformed homunculus?

A fool’s errand given by fools.

Here the depth of despair is followed by apparent madness:

Son, go fetch a pint of pigeon’s milk

from the drugstore and be quick.

Demons on the left. . . .

Then a quick recollection from childhood:

. . . Death on either side,

the Rabbi said, the way of life between.

The next lines counterpoint the suffering of another man, presumably a man without faith (he is a “two-timing lover”), to that of the poet, who takes heart from realizing that his own predicament is not so bad:

[Page 43]

That groaning. Man with his belly slashed,

two-timing lover. Dying?

The nightnurse rustles by.

Struggles in the pit. I have come back

to tell thee of struggles in the pit.

Perhaps is dying.

Free of pain, my own death still

a theorem to be proved.

The poet conquers, comes back from the pit of doubt and despair; perhaps also the memory of Bahá’u’lláh in the pit (the Síyáh-Chál) has been of comfort to him. The poem ends with a prayer of acceptance and gratitude.

Alláh’u’Abhá. O Healing Spirit,

Thy nearness our forgiving cure.

If in this poem religious faith comes as a saving grace after a night of doubt, in the sequence “An Inference of Mexico” the inferred presence of God is highly ambiguous. The sequence begins with the savage light, the vulturous presence of death; but despite the “cruciform black bells of clay” the tone and imagery are pagan. God is absent; only heathen death and corruption remain.

In “Mountains,” the second poem of the sequence, we find the darkness “imploring a god”—perhaps still a pagan god, but at least a bringer of light. In “Veracruz” it is the pagan sea that dominates, that seems the only reality. The shore “appears a destination dreamed of, / never to be reached.” The sea offers a languid temptation:

Leap now

and cease from error.

Escape.

But there is an alternative:

Or shoreward turn,

accepting all

the losses and farewells,

the long warfare with self,

with God.

The breakwater leads either way, and in this phantasmal scene the reality of the sea is stronger; God is felt to be a presence to be quarreled with.

In “Idol” we seem to find the goddess the mountains’ darkness was imploring, but it is a violent, savage goddess, thriving on blood sacrifice, offering no light but taking misguided praise. In “Sub Specie Aeternitatis” two moments in man’s religious search (the pagan and the Christian) are counterpointed; [Page 44] both are empty, silent. The empty convent “lifts / its cross against a dark / invasive as the sun”; “hollow cells / are desolate in their / tranquility / as relic skulls.” Likewise, the pagan god, once “a tippling fiercely joyous god” is now “a conquered and / defiant god.” The silence of the gods is palpable.

In “Market” the degradation of the gods is complete. The tourists who “stride / on the hard good legs / money has made them” ignore the barefoot cripple asking for charity and pass by everything in indifference, carcass, dogs, and carnations alike. Even the pagan Fire King is reduced to a “flashing mask of tin” that “looks down with eyes / of sunstruck glass.”

It is only in “La Corrida” that the reality of the bullfight prompts a deeper perception of the supernatural; here, in the presence of death, “the bullgod moves, / transfiguring death / and the wish to die.” There follows a prayer:

From all we are yet cannot be

deliver, oh redeem us now.

Of all we know and do not wish

to know, purge oh purge us now.

Olé!

Upon the cross of horns

be crucified for us.

Die for us that death

may call us back to life.

Olé!

With this strange fusion of pagan ceremony and Christian sentiment the Mexico sequence ends. In it the dominant tone is pagan; the mystical or religious is fleeting and ambiguous, empty or threatening or silent or degraded. As in “The Broken Dark” only death prompts the summoning of the divine powers, but here even that summons is ironic.

AN ILLUMINATING, if rather detached and ironic, statement of one stage in the evolution of Hayden’s attitude toward religion is the poem “Electrical Storm,” which I quote in full:

God’s angry with the world again,

the grey neglected ones would say;

He don’t like ugly.

Have mercy, Lord, they prayed,

seeing the lightning’s

Mene Mene Tekel,

hearing the preaching thunder’s deep

Upharsin.

[Page 45]

They hunched up, contracting in corners

away from windows and the dog;

huddled under Jehovah’s oldtime wrath,

trusting, afraid.

I huddled too, when a boy,

mindful of things they’d told me

God was bound to make me answer for.

But later I was colleged (as they said)

and learned it was not celestial ire

(Beware the infidels, my son)

but pressure systems,

colliding massive energies

that make a storm.

Well for us. . . .

Last night we drove

through suddenly warring weather.

Wind and lightning havocked,

berserked in wires, trees.

Fallen lines we could not see at first

lay in the yard when we reached home.

The hedge was burning in the rain.

Who knows but what

we might have crossed another sill,

had not our neighbors’ warning

kept us from our door?

Who knows if it was heavenly design

or chance

(or knows if there’s a difference, after all)

that brought us and our neighbors through—

though others died—

the archetypal dangers of the night?

I know what those

cowering true believers would have said.

While not overtly or utterly irreligious in its attitude, the scepticism of this poem is certainly far closer in tone and outlook to the benign agnosticism of Robert Frost (whose language and imagery seem to be echoed in the last stanza) than to the faith of “Full Moon” that follows this in Selected Poems.

And spread its radiance on the exile’s path

of Him Who was The Glorious One,

its light made holy by His holiness.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

[Page 46]

the full moon dominates the dark.

The explanation for this shift in attitude may lie in the different specific beliefs to which Hayden refers. In “Electrical Storm” Hayden makes it clear that he has outgrown the doctrines he was taught as a child, with their naive belief in an anthropomorphic God, Who intervened in every moment of one’s life and demanded a strange alloy of trust and fear in worship. In “Full Moon,” however, and in the other Bahá’í poems, Hayden is celebrating the healing grace of Bahá’u’lláh, Whose teachings are felt to be mature, purified of superstition, convincing, and moving. Consistently in his poetry Hayden dissociates himself from the superstitious beliefs of the people among whom he grew up, pointing with irony to their gullibility and weakness; but as if by a kind of reflex action his faith in Bahá’u’lláh seems to burn that much the stronger.

The midnight air is forested

with presences that shelter Him

and sheltering praise

The auroral darkness which is God

and sing the word made flesh again

in Him,

Eternal exile whose return

epiphanies repeatedly

foretell.

“Bahá’u’lláh in the Garden of Ridwan”

The rationality of the Bahá’í Faith, and its historical appropriateness for our time, exempt it from irony. In no poem is the Bahá’í Faith treated with anything but loving belief.

The contrast, then, is between childish superstition and mature faith, between Christian dogma and Bahá’í rationality. While interested in all forms and manifestations of the religious outlook, Hayden is able to lend it credence only when it takes on the form of a universal faith; from that vantage point he can look with fondness on the other guises that the religious impulse has taken. As in “Akhenaten” (“Two Egyptian Portrait Masks”) he can affirm the essential identity of all gods.

Upon the

mountain Aten spoke

and set the spirit moving

in the

Pharaoh’s heart: O Lord of every land

shining forth for all:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

[Page 47]

. . . the spirit moving

in his heart: Aten Jahveh Allah God.

It is perhaps because of this innermost identity of the religious vocation, because of the basic unity of God, as taught by the Bahá’í Faith in its formulation of progressive revelation, that no religious expression is ever condemned or viewed with anything more critical than ironic scepticism or satirical distance. Even the deluded are right in their longing.

The single poem that most completely states Hayden’s attitude to the religion he has adopted is one in which there is no overt reference to the Bahá’í Faith at all and only a few direct references to gods. Yet “The Night-Blooming Cereus” is one of Hayden’s most religious meditations, as well as one of his most beautiful and complex.

In it, the unfolding of the Bahá’í Faith is likened to the blooming of the cereus. The two persons in the poem (perhaps the poet and his wife?) take slightly different attitudes toward this blooming but are united in their awe of it. Despite the poet’s momentary revulsion, he comes to celebrate the bloom as much as the other, and their final attitude is one of wonder and astonishment.

At the beginning of the poem the two persons are waiting for the bud to “break into flower.” The bud, “packed / tight with its miracle” “moved / as though impelled / by stirrings within itself.” The poet is ambivalent about it: “It repelled as much / as it fascinated me / sometimes,” The other is more serene: “But you, my dear, / conceded less to the bizarre / than to the imminence / bloom.” Awe unites them: “Yet we agreed we ought / to celebrate the blossom, / paint ourselves, dance / in honor of / archaic mysteries / when it appeared.” Meanwhile, they became aware of the bud’s “rigorous design” and “focused energy of will.” The bud exists independently of them, and its meanings are not for them: “that / signalling / not meant for us.” It appears in darkness (an allusion to the night of ignorance, particularly in nineteenth-century Iran?) but possesses a grace that attracts (a “summoning fragrance”). Before it mundane worries are abandoned: “We dropped / trivial tasks / and marvelling / beheld at last the achieved / flower.” It has not yet achieved full growth, though: “Its moonlight / petals were / still unfold- / ing.” This flower is called a “lunar presence” (and has “moonlight petals”) in reminiscence of the “full moon” that illuminates our dark, the moon that shone on Bahá’u’lláh. And in accordance with Bahá’í teaching, that every new religion starts to die as soon as it is born, and is eventually replaced by another, the bloom is “foredoomed, already dying.” At the same time it is utterly ancient: “older than human / cries, ancient as prayers / invoking Osiris, Krishna, / Tezcátlipóca.” The observers’ final stance is one of silent worship: “We spoke / in whispers when / we spoke / at all . . .”

This same awe is found in Hayden’s other poems about Bahá’u’lláh:

[Page 48]

. . . He, who is man beatified

And Godly mystery,

. . .His pain

our anguish and our anodyne.

“‘From the Corpse Woodpiles, from the Ashes’”

. . . Energies

like angels dance

Glorias of recognition.

Within the rock the undiscovered suns

release their light.

“Bahá’u’lláh in the Garden of Ridwan”

There would seem to be little that could be added to such mystic wonderment. As with all mystics, Hayden’s true message can only be adequately expressed by silence, by a kind of ritual pointing at the ineffable. It is the irony of his or any mystic’s fate to have to do this pointing with words.

A recent poem, “Theory of Evil,” adds little more than a theological footnote to Hayden’s already defined religious and mystical stance, suggesting as it does that even evil may be created by God for His own good purposes.

Almighty God

He fashioned me

for to be a scourge,

the scourge of all humanity.

It is difficult to know just how seriously Hayden means the reader to take this, but the idea would seem to be, perhaps, in accordance with Bahá’í ideas on the nonexistence of evil and more particularly with Shoghi Effendi’s interpretation of apparent historical evil as furthering the process of chastening and refining the human race for its coming maturity.

In any case, Hayden’s final message is one not of despair, but of faith and hope—quite unusually so in today’s literary world. It is difficult to think of any other contemporary poet for whom the religious experience is so meaningful; perhaps only John Berryman in his later years approached the intensity of mystical feeling present in the best of Hayden’s verse. But Berryman could never be a steady convert, and the temptation of death was too strong for him. It is not too much to say that Robert Hayden’s peculiar religious stance makes him unique in modern letters and contributes powerfully to the formation of his rich poetic personality.

[Page 49]

[Page 50]

In Memoriam: In Gratitude for Robert Hayden

BY JULIUS LESTER

Copyright © 1981 by Julius Lester. This talk was presented at a memorial service for Robert Hayden arranged by the Bahá’ís of Amherst, Massachusetts, at the University of Massachusetts on 17 April 1980.

“Live in such a way that your descendants will be grateful.” Thus wrote Ezra Pound in a letter to his daughter, and so we are gathered here tonight to honor and celebrate one whose life and work has earned the gratitude of even the as yet unborn.

Robert Hayden was a poet, but a poet is more than one who writes poems. A poet is even more than the one who, in Hannah Arendt’s words, “coin[s] the words we live by.” Or at least Robert Hayden was.

He was a man who wrote and lived the vision of what it is to be human in a world that sought to deny him humanity because he was black. He was a man who gave of himself, in his poetry and his life, and suffered the inevitable consequences of such giving. He was a man who dared to be in a world that does not honor spiritual daring.

When I entered Fisk University in the fall of 1956, he had been there ten years already, an associate professor in the English department. That he was a poet was of no consequence to his colleagues. “They don’t even know what a poet is,” he said sometimes, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. He was sometimes pressured to publish, and once he mentioned to the department chairman a volume of his poems that had been privately printed. The chairman, who was white, replied, “Yes, yes, but your poems are too often about race. You should write on the more universal themes.”

He was a lonely figure on campus. That was my overwhelming impression the first time I saw him. He was walking alone in the quiet dusk of an autumn evening past the grove of magnolia trees. His head was bent to one side as if his neck were permanently wrenched. In his right arm, books were cradled against his chest. He walked rapidly, nervously, and though I had heard only his name from upperclassmen, I knew: “That’s Mr. Hayden.”

The loneliness I sensed in him was also, of course, an intimation of a loneliness I was to know well in the ensuing years, a loneliness he educated me to expect and endure. It was not only the loneliness that comes when you respond to the urgings of your inner voice, knowing that few will understand or care, and most will scoff. There was also the loneliness of being a poet and being black.

Anais Nin, in the fourth volume of her Diaries, quotes Richard Wright as telling her:

“as a writer here I am strangled by petty humiliations, and daily insults. I am obsessed with only one theme. I need perspective. I need to get away from personal hurts, my personal irritations. I am so constantly disturbed I cannot even work. I need to live free if I am to expand as a writer.”

It is impossible for a black writer to live free. How much more so that was true during Mr. Hayden’s years at Fisk. The South was still segregated then and to leave the campus and venture into town was to enter a bizarre world where life was managed by signs: “White” and “Colored” were everywhere, denoting the separate sections on the bus, the separate water fountains in the stores, the separate entrances at the railway and bus stations; and the “No Colored Allowed” in the [Page 51] doors and windows of restaurants and coffeeshops. The society conspired to tell you in every imaginable way that, in the scheme of things, you were negligible and expendable.

This was the deeper loneliness, intensified by knowing in your soul who you were and being unable to find confirmation for your knowledge in the soul of none other, except your wife, a few friends in distant places, and a student now and then.

Yet Mr. Hayden managed to maintain faith in his soul even while teaching fifteen hours of classes a week each semester. He taught two sections of freshman English, one of sophomore humanities, a class in American literature, and one in Victorian literature. Then, if he wanted to, he could offer a seminar in creative writing.

It is not surprising that he suffered frequent and enervating migraine headaches of such severity that he would have to go to bed for several days at a time. Under such circumstances being a poet could bring him no joy. He used to speak of it as a “curse,” a compulsion to which he had to submit.

Writing extracts a fearful toll, even under the most beneficent of circumstances. Yet despite his pain and loneliness he always made it clear to those of us who were foolish enough to think that we wanted to write that perhaps our experiences would be different.

What is remarkable is how conscientious a teacher he was. Unfortunately, I did not benefit as I might have because he and I loved very different literature. I recall him rhapsodizing in class about Henry James and about Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. I was convinced that the American tragedy was that Dreiser had written An American Tragedy. I studied Victorian literature with him, too. That made Henry James almost exciting.

Despite my lack of academic ambition or success, Mr. Hayden and I developed a profoundly personal relationship because he was the one who looked at me one day and said, “You are a writer.” He became my father and mother because he midwifed the writer-in-me and, after bringing it into the light, shaped and molded the writer and me. He taught me very little about the craft of writing, however, because, as he said, “A person is either a writer, or they aren’t. And the only way to be a writer is to write, and then rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.” He was fond of telling how Dylan Thomas rewrote one poem seventy-five times.

I marvel at his wisdom because he knew that to be a writer and survive requires a strong character. He talked about the loneliness with which I would have to live, and he talked about the demons that lay waiting within that loneliness.

The year after I graduated was spent there in Nashville, where my parents indulged me in unemployment while I wrote. After some months of sending out manuscripts and having them promptly returned I concluded that I was not a writer and told Mr. Hayden so. He was quiet for a long while and then said simply, “You will always have doubts. Doubting that you are a writer is part of being a writer.” Maybe it was then that he told me one of his favorite stories, one about Oscar Wilde, who said: “At ten, I sat down to write. At eleven, I put in a comma. At twelve, I took it out. At one, I put it back in and went to lunch.”

How many times in the years since have I reached that place where it is evident that [Page 52] any ability I might have had was not only overrated but was exhausted without hope of resuscitation. Then I remember the story about Oscar Wilde and hear Mr. Hayden’s voice eruptng into loud, raucous laughter.

UNLIKE many teachers today who feel that they should be their students’ peers, that they should “hang out” and smoke various kinds of vegetation with them, Mr. Hayden did not violate himself or his students by seeking our approval in that way. I never walked into his office expecting to be received because he guarded his time fiercely. “I’m busy,” I heard more often than not. I learned that a writer does not dissipate his energies, not even for a favorite student.

He taught me a lifelong lesson in a note attached to a paper I turned in to him during my senior year. Whatever the paper was about, I know that I did the least possible to fulfill the assignment. It was my last year, and whether I graduated or not, I was leaving. That was all I knew and all I cared about. My work reflected this attitude. Mr. Hayden wrote:

Julius

I am upset by this “performance,” because you are obviously the ablest and most original thinker in this class, not excluding the poor old baffled broken-down instructor. Yet you seem to be throwing everything you have away—or at least not using all your resources. Even this paper has gleams and flashes of wit and insight which do not appear on anyone else’s. If I thought that giving you a D would make you perk up, believe me I’d slap one on you. But I know it wouldn’t accomplish anything for you in your present state of mind. Whatever you may think of Victorian lit. as such, you must not commit the unpardonable (to me) “sin” of not using all your really superb gifts at all times. What is not used atrophies, as you well know.

Besides all this, I need your support in this and the other classes you have with me. When you of all people don’t do your work you add to my feelings of frustration. Can you understand what I mean by this?

I don’t think I have ever experienced such shame as during the moments I read those words. And it was in those moments that I ceased to be an adolescent and began to take myself seriously as an adult.

It is the rarest of teachers who so gives of himself to a student that he can say: I need you. And, of course, I responded.

He gave to me in a different way at the end of that year. To graduate I had to pass comprehensive exams in English and American literature; the latter was supervised by Mr. Hayden. I remember walking into the examination room and looking at the exam. There was not one question on it I could even understand. A brief consultation with myself made it obvious that there was only one thing to do: Write my name very neatly on the cover of the Blue Book, hand it to Mr. Hayden who sat at the head of the long oak table, and go walk in the sun.

Late that day I happened to see him. “Well, young man. You really did it this time,” he said gaily.

I could find no words.

“I gave you a ‘C’,” he said finally. “If I flunked you and made you stay another year, you’d flunk next year, wouldn’t you?”

I allowed as to how that was true. Thus I graduated, not because I had earned my degree but because Mr. Hayden thought I was more than the sum of my academic performance. Thus he taught me how to express caring, particularly when caring about someone means going against your own standards and values.

I left Nashville and Fisk a year after graduation and did not see Mr. Hayden again until late May 1966. I was working as a photographer then for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and had just come from the staff meeting where Stokely Carmichael had been elected chairman. Black Power was a few short weeks away from convulsing America and ushering in a new era [Page 53] in black American history, but Mr. Hayden had already felt the heat of its approaching flames. At a writers’ conference at Fisk a few weeks before, he had been attacked as an “Uncle Tom” by students and other black writers because he insisted that he was a poet, not a black poet.

He had also just been awarded the Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts at Dakar, Senegal. That honor was not enough to offset the rejection and attack made on him at the conference. I was scarcely seated in his living room before he began a tirade against black nationalists. I listened again as he maintained angrily that there was “no such thing as black literature. There’s good literature, and there’s bad. And that’s all!” I couldn’t understand why he was so vociferous in denying that he was a black poet. After all, he was the man who had written “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” “Homage to the Empress of the Blues,” and “Runagate, Runagate,” four of the finest poems about the black experience in the English language. Why couldn’t he admit he was a black poet?

But being a black artist has been difficult always. The mere fact that you are black means you are associated with a “cause.” It is your birthright, whether you want it to be or not. It is the black writer’s sentence to have his work judged more on the basis of racial content than artistic merit. This is because whites grant individuality only to whites. A black Writer is a representative, a spokesman.

The prevailing black aesthetic of the late sixties was summarized succinctly by Ron Karenga, who writes: “All art must reflect and support the Black Revolution and any art that does not discuss and contribute to the revolution is invalid. Black art must expose the enemy, praise the people and support the revolution.” In other words, art should be the voice of political ideology, and the black artist must comply or find himself with an indifferent white audience and no black one.

To Mr. Hayden, who was not conceived or reborn in the womb of Black Power, such thinking was not only repugnant; it was a direct assault on the human spirit and art. By its very nature, art, Mr. Hayden taught, is revolutionary, because it seeks to change the consciousness, perceptions, and very beings of those who open themselves to it. However, its revolutionary nature can be only mortally wounded if it must meet political prescriptions.

I found myself caught between what I had learned from Mr. Hayden and the new ethos. But on that day in May 1966 I felt great pain for him because, of all people, he did not deserve public humiliation at the hands of black people angered because he refused to lead them to the holy wars. The humiliation was compounded when Fisk University hired a black writer with the “proper” political credentials to be Writer-in-Residence. This meant that Mr. Hayden could no longer teach creative writing. That Writer-in-Residence did much, I understand, to make Mr. Hayden’s humiliation continual by discouraging students from studying with him. Thankfully, a year or so later he was invited to return and teach at his alma mater, the University of Michigan.

THE LAST TIME I saw him was in the mid-seventies in New York. By that time I had resolved my conflicts about the role and responsibility of the black writer in a review I wrote for the Sunday Times Book Review in January 1971. The review was of Mr. Hayden’s book Words in the Mourning Time.

I remember my mourning time well because it was a painful one of introspection and redefinition. I had been a revolutionary, but something inside me had remained dissatisfied. I had used my pen to further the revolution, but something inside me felt betrayed. During the early winter of 1971 I sat alone in my room at the Hotel Chelsea in New York and somehow found myself reading an advance copy of Words in the Mourning Time. Once more I was in the presence of that man who honored language. I remembered him saying that writing consisted [Page 54] of words. “It is assumed that you have something to say,” he told me. “Writing is caring enough to say it as well as the talent God gave you will allow.”

I read his poetry again, and in his images I experienced the world as if it were new. Because he loved language, each word in his poems is precise, so that the lines of his poetry are so tightly compressed as to be unbearable.

In sun-whetted

morning,

the dropped gull

splayed

on sand,

wind

picking at

its feathers.

Over the headlong

toppling

rush and leashed-back

mica’d

fall of the sea,

gulls

scouting and

crying.

He does not use language to indulge himself in “expressing his emotions,” something for which he scorned and singed our hides whenever we came remotely close to doing so. He used language to create worlds and make us see, because the work of a true poet should make us recognize that we gaze on the world with blind eyes and call what we see real.

He also chose words with the care of a sculptor chipping into marble. For example, in his poem “El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz” he gives a vivid historical portrait of Malcolm X in six short lines:

He X’d his name, became his people’s anger,

exhorted them to vengeance for their past;

rebuked, admonished them,

their scourger who

would shame them, drive them from

the lush ice gardens of their servitude.

Knowing how long it took him to write a poem, I wondered if it had taken him months to find that line, “He X’d his name.” Such a simple, direct line, but it sets up reverberations that extend back to August 1619. The last stanza of the poem could serve as Malcolm’s epitaph:

He fell upon his face before

Allah the raceless in whose blazing Oneness all

were one. He rose renewed renamed, became

much more than there was time for him to be.

Words in the Mourning Time was proof that Mr. Hayden had been right: There is only good literature and bad. My review of the book was the first major review of his poetry; one result of the attention was the book’s nomination that year for the National Book Award, Maybe it was not just coincidence that I, too, had a book nominated for the NBA that same year.

So when he called me that Sunday afternoon sometime in the mid-seventies, there was a joyous reunion held in his room at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. He and his wife, Erma, looked like a young couple on their honeymoon. The recognition due him was finally coming, with his election to the American Academy of Poets, and his appointment as Consultant for Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position equivalent to poet laureate of America.

Certainly, few contemporary poets knew their craft as well. He loved poetic meters and could write in many kinds. He had the discipline to be always learning his craft, ever seeking ways to find that elusive point where sound, rhythm, and sense converged in the one right word in the right place in a line of poetry.

He was always open to the new. In 1958 I discovered haiku and began studying them assiduously. I showed him my haiku as I wrote them. A few months later I happened [Page 55] to be at his house, and he handed me some sheets of paper. I looked at them. They were haiku he had written. I read them and had to tell him that they were okay but not good enough to be really haiku. Like all writers, he did not take such judgments easily but managed to laugh and say, “Well, that’s the last time I’ll show you my poems.” It wasn’t. But Robert Hayden was a man of uncompromising integrity, and in his Selected Poems he published the four haiku I had seen. But he titled them “Approximations.” The true teacher is one who will accept the criticism of a student, even an arrogant one.

Whatever Robert Hayden wrote, he wrote with an integrity that was intimidating. His insistence that he was not a black poet, but a poet, was not a denial of his race. His poetry is proof enough that he never denied that. However, he did not make the mistake of believing that who he was as a human being could be contained in blackness. He was born to live in the universe.

Further, he knew what many black writers today do not know. To insist upon a separate identity as a black writer is to place oneself in a literary ghetto where you will be considered only good enough to be compared to other black writers but not to your peers who are not black. Robert Hayden did not mind if his poetry was compared with that of Leroi Jones, but that should not be the only comparison. He was an American poet writing out of the totality of his life’s experience, part of which was racial, just as Robert Lowell was an American poet writing out of his experience, part of which was as a Catholic.

Mr. Hayden never submitted to the identity of his vocation that others insisted in imposing upon him. It is here, I think that his religion sustained and nurtured him through the long years of isolation, through the times of asserting his humanity in the face of whites and blacks who wanted to deny him that. He was never hesitant in talking about his faith as a Bahá’í. I perceived that it helped him maintain his center where men of lesser faith would have succumbed to bitterness and self-pity. I perceived that it gave him the courage to withstand the migraines as well as the lesions inflicted on his soul. I perceived that it gave him the courage to be whom God intended him to be.

In the ninth part of the title poem of Words in the Mourning Time, he wrote:

We must not be frightened nor cajoled

into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.

We must go on struggling to be human,

though monsters of abstraction

police and threaten us.

Reclaim now, now renew the vision of

a human world where godliness

is possible and man

is neither gook, nigger, honkey, wop, nor kike

but man

permitted to be man.

If we ever reach that time when man is permitted to be man, one of the reasons will be this man, Robert Hayden, who when pressed into the most terrifying corners of loneliness, refused to capitulate to those, who in the screaming agony of their own pain and loneliness, could do nothing but return evil for evil.

This man, Robert Hayden, lived in such a way that we must be grateful. I cannot mourn the ending of a life that was lived so well.

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Authors & Artists

DONNA E. M. DENIZÉ, a student of Robert Hayden, is pursuing an M.A. degree in English literature at Howard University. In 1979 she won the Academy of American Poets contest at Howard University and in 1980 honorable mention. Her interests include the relationships among teaching, theater arts, and dramatic poetry.

JULIUS LESTER, one of Robert Hayden’s students, is a professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts. He has published eleven books of fiction, black history, political commentary, poetry, and folklore, as well as an autobiography.

JACOB MILLER, a poet and an editor, is yet another student of Robert Hayden. In 1978 he received the Hopwood Award for Poetry from the University of Michigan and a fellowship from the Michigan Writers’ Guild. During the last several years he has received grants from the University of Michigan and the Michigan Council for the Arts to publish Empyrea magazine. His first book on poetry, Sleep Is a Ritual of Disorder, will be published later this year.

GERALD PARKS, who holds a B.A. in Latin from the University of Washington and an M.A. in classical studies from the University of Michigan, teaches translation at the School of Modern Languages at the University of Trieste. He has published poems in English and Italian, short stories, articles, essays, and a book of applied linguistics. His “The Necessity for a Utopia” appeared in our Fall 1974 issue and “A Model for Moral Judgments” in our Winter 1977-78 issue.

PONTHEOLLA T. WILLIAMS, who holds M.A. and Ed.D. degrees from Columbia University, Teachers College, is the director of the Basic Studies Program of Morris College in Sumter, South Carolina. Her doctoral dissertation was a critical analysis of Robert Hayden’s poetry through his middle period. She is now working on a critical biography of Hayden. In her spare time she is a builder-developer specializing in one-family dwellings, a gourmet cook, and a social welfare worker.

ART CREDITS: Cover, design by John Solarz, photograph by David Ogron: p. 1, photograph by Delton Baerwolf; p. 3, photograph by George O. Miller; p. 5, photograph of Robert Hayden, courtesy Bahá’í National Archives; p. 9, photograph by Scott Stafford; p. 10, photograph by Michael and Charlene Winger-Bearskin; p. 49, photograph by Michael and Charlene Winger-Bearskin; p. 56, photograph of Robert Hayden, courtesy Bahá’í National Archives.

OMISSIONS: World Order regrets that because of an oversight art credits were omitted from the Summer 1981 issue and takes the opportunity to give them here: Cover, design by John Solarz, photograph by George O. Miller; p. 1, photograph by Grace Nielsen; p. 3, photograph by George O. Miller; p. 6, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 17, photograph by George O. Miller; p. 29, photograph by John S. MacCord, Jr.

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