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[Page i]Religion • Society • Polity • Arts

WORLD ORDER

In this issue...

Is Religion Necessary? Editorial

Emerging from a Heart-Shape in the Dust: Maturation in the Poetics of Robert Hayden Derik Smith

Robert Hayden: Speaking across Three Decades Interview by Glenford E. Mitchell Introduction by Derik Smith

AfterWord Reflections on a 1976 Interview with Robert Hayden Glenford E. Mitchell

Poems The Whipping Words in the Mourning Time, V and IX The Year of the Child And all the atoms cry aloud Dawnbreaker by Robert Hayden

Robert Hayden A Poet for All Times

2005-06 Volume 37, No. 2 [Page ii]Religion Society Polity Arts WORLD ORDER

WORLD ORDER AIMS TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE, AND SERVE ITS READERS IN THEIR SEARCH TO UNDERSTAND THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY.

EDITORIAL BOARD

Betty J. Fisher Arash Abizadeh Monireh Kazemzadeh Diane Lotfi Robert H. Stockman Jim Stokes

REVIEW EDITOR

Kevin A. Morrison

CONSULTANT IN POETRY

Herbert Woodward Martin

INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS

World Order is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 536 Sheridan Road, Wilmette, IL 60091-1811. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher or of the Editorial Board.

Peer review: Submissions to the journal will be subject to external blind peer review if they fall outside the expertise of the Editorial Board or upon request by the author.

Submissions and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to the Editor, World Order, 7311 Quail Springs Place NE, Albuquerque, NM 87113-1780 or e-mailed to <worldorder@usbnc.org>. Detailed information for contributors may be requested in writing or by e-mail.

Manuscripts may be typewritten or computer generated; manuscripts accepted for publication are requested on computer disk (Microsoft Word or WordPerfect preferred) or by electronic submission. Article and review manuscripts must be double-spaced throughout and prepared in a 12-point Courier font; the footnotes must be at the end of the text and not attached electronically to the text. Each manuscript should list on the first page the article title, the author(s), and addresses, including telephone, fax, and e-mail.

Articles may range in length from some 3.750 to 6,250 words.

Reviews vary in length. Review Notes run from some 125 to 150 words; Mini-Reviews run from some 1,000 to 2,500 words, and Review Essays, from some 3.750 to 6,250 words.

Poems should be single spaced with clearly marked stanza breaks,

World Order is indexed in the Index of American Periodical Verse, the ATLA Religion Database. and The American Humanities Index and is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

INFORMATION FOR SUBSCRIBERS

CELJ

Subscription Rates: U.S.A. and surface to all other countries, 1 year, US $25; 2 years, US $48. Airmail to all other countries, 1 year, US $30, 2 years, US $58. Single copies US $7 plus shipping and handling. Make checks or money orders payable to Bahá’í Distribution Service. Send address changes to and order subscriptions from the Bahá’í Distribution Service, 4703 Fulton Industrial Boulevard, Atlanta, GA 30336-2017. Telephone: 1-800-999-9019, United States and Canada; 404-472-9019, all other countries. Or. please e-mail: <subscription@usbnc.org>.

Back issues still in print may be obtained from the Bahá’í Distribution Service at the mailing address above or by e-mail at <bds@usbnc.org>. Orders for back issues on microfilm or microfiche can be obtained from National Archive Publishing Company, 300 North Zeeb Road, P.O. Box 998. Ann Arbor, MI 48106-0998 USA. Telephone: 1-800-420-6272. E-mail: <info@napubco.com>.

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright 2006 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States; all rights reserved. World Order is protected through trademark registration in the U.S. Patent Office. Printed in the U.S.A. ISSN 0043-8804.

ART CREDITS

Cover design by Rick Doering; cover photograph, courtesy, David Smith and the National Bahá’í Archives, United States; pp. 8, 28, 37, courtesy, David Smith and the National Bahá’í Archives, United States; pp. 42. 45, courtesy, Glenford E. Mitchell. [Page 1]

CONTENTS

2	Is Religion Necessary? Editorial
4	Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor
9	Emerging from a Heart-Shape in the Dust: Maturation in the Poetics of Robert Hayden Derik Smith
27	The Whipping a poem by Robert Hayden
29	Robert Hayden: Speaking across Three Decades interview by Glenford E. Mitchell introduction by Derik Smith
39	Words in the Mourning Time, Parts V, IX a poem by Robert Hayden
40	The Year of the Child a poem by Robert Hayden
43	AfterWord: Reflections on a 1976 Interview with Robert Hayden Glenford E. Mitchell
46	And all the atoms cry aloud a poem by Robert Hayden
48	Dawnbreaker a poem by Robert Hayden

[Page 2]

Is Religion Necessary?

Most of the peoples of the world identify themselves as belonging to a religion. While membership in religious institutions is declining in some cultures, in many others it is thriving, and even increasing. Islam is said to be among the fastest growing of the older religions worldwide, and some Christian denominations are experiencing significant growth, as are several younger religions. In a world afflicted with a seemingly endless number of natural and human-made catastrophes, some of them biblical in their proportions, people often find comfort, solace, and reassurance in communion with God made possible through their respective faiths. In times of crisis and trouble, many people- expressing what appears to be an innate human yearning to connect with a higher reality seem to find religion necessary.

Yet at the same time, among many in the educated classes religion has never enjoyed less credibility. A great many people tend to think of religion as an option or a "life-style" choice rather than a necessity (if they think of it at all), whereas they consider the applied sciences, mathematics, and the professional disciplines absolute essentials. There is a tendency to cast these methodologies as valid modes for making and disseminating knowledge, which they assuredly can be, but to cast religion as an exercise in emotionalism, blind hope, "miracle-ism," or other extrarational approaches.

The modern Western world was born amidst the many revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It has been shrewdly observed that during the bloody years of the early seventeenth century, most of the "great men" were theologians or lawyers. But by the mid-seventeenth century, with society desperately seeking social peace, most "great men" were astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, anatomists, or philosophers, laying the foundations for a gradually emerging secular and materialist worldview. By the mid-eighteenth century, with the human gaze firmly, if uneasily, redirected from things unseen to things of the world, the poet Alexander Pope could deliver his famous verse injunction as an article of faith: "presume not God to scan; / The proper study of mankind is man." One reason for the marginalization and discrediting of religion today is that, though science and materialist philosophy have hardly put a stop to war and universal disorder, they have indeed vastly improved physical well-being for many. Another reason lies in the failures of religious institutions themselves. People react negatively when they see corrupt spiritual leaders engaging in moral or ethical excesses or using religious teachings to incite sectarian violence that has no lesser aim than to ignite wars that might engulf the world. [Page 3]In such a context, how can one possibly argue for the necessity of religion, other than as a personal spiritual palliative? Yet it is both the decline and the corruption of religion that is depriving humankind of spiritual guidance and preventing it from attaining its full human potential. More than a century ago Bahá’u’lláh wrote that “religion is the greatest of all means for the establishment of order in the world and for the peaceful contentment of all that dwell therein. The weakening of the pillars of religion hath strengthened the hands of the ignorant and made them bold and arrogant.” Commenting on Bahá’u’lláh’s statement, Shoghi Effendi wrote

No wonder, therefore, that when, as a result of human perversity, the light of religion is quenched in men’s hearts, and the divinely appointed Robe, designed to adorn the human temple, is deliberately discarded, a deplorable decline in the fortunes of humanity immediately sets in, bringing in its wake all the evils which a wayward soul is capable of revealing.

Shoghi Effendi then details these evils, stating that “The perversion of human nature, the degradation of human conduct, the corruption and dissolution of human institutions, reveal themselves, under such circumstances, in their worst and most revolting aspects.” It is understandable, therefore, that under the present circumstances

Human character is debased, confidence is shaken, the nerves of discipline are relaxed, the voice of human conscience is stilled, the sense of decency and shame is obscured, conceptions of duty, of solidarity, of reciprocity and loyalty are distorted, and the very feeling of peacefulness, of joy and of hope is gradually extinguished.

Detailing further the results of the “decline of religion as a social force,” Shoghi Effendi concludes with a portrait of the age and with a set of choices:

The recrudescence of religious intolerance, of racial animosity, and of patriotic arrogance; the increasing evidences of selfishness, of suspicion, of fear and of fraud; the spread of terrorism, of lawlessness, of drunkenness and of crime; the unquenchable thirst for, and the feverish pursuit after, earthly vanities, riches and pleasures; the weakening of family solidarity; the laxity in parental control; the lapse into luxurious indulgence; the irresponsible attitude towards marriage and the consequent rising tide of divorce; the degeneracy of art and music, the infection of literature, and the corruption of the press; the extension of the influence and activities of those ‘prophets of decadence’ who . . . would, if given free rein, lead back the human race to barbarism, chaos, and ultimate extinction—these appear as the outstanding characteristics of a decadent society, a society that must either be reborn or perish.

[Page 4]

Interchange

Letters from and to the Editor

The year 2006, the thirtieth anniversary of the appointment of Robert Hayden as Consultant in Poetry to the U.S. Library of Congress, the first African American to be so honored, affords us an excellent opportunity to revisit the life and works of one of the major poets of the twentieth century.

In "Emerging from a Heart-Shape in the Dust: Maturation in the Poetics of Robert Hayden," Derik Smith uses the anniversary of Hayden's appointment as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress to examine Hayden's first collection of poems, a volume that Hayden later disowned as juvenilia, to find "moral sensibilities" and a "philosophy of art" that, despite a maturation of aesthetics and ideology, remained constant throughout Hayden's life. The anniversary year also provides an opportunity for Smith, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Hayden and is now working on a study of his poetry, to comment on Hayden's still-growing reputation as one of the foremost poets of the twentieth century.

Revisiting Hayden's life and works provides an opportunity to reprint an interview that World Order commissioned in 1976 as part of its U.S. Bicentennial issue. In the interview conducted by the magazine's then managing editor Glenford E. Mitchell, Hayden responded to questions centering on his feelings about his country's past, future, and destiny; about art in America; and about his own poetry and its sources—in America, in his dedication to his craft, in his religious beliefs. Derik Smith's head note provides context, updates on Hayden's life, and further analysis of his reputation.

The third contribution to the Hayden issue includes the reflections that Glenford Mitchell penned in May 2006 about his 1976 interview with Hayden, who served as World Order's poetry editor from 1966 until his death in 1980. Mitchell's thoughts allowed us to revisit memories forged in the intellectual discussions and in the minutiae that go into producing a magazine—with a poet as an ever-vigilant advocate for the role poetry should play in such a publication. Mitchell gives us brief glimpses into Hayden's contributions to World Order, the liveliness and intellectual curiosity he brought to Editorial Board meetings, and a perspective on his intellectual and spiritual approach to his work—all opening for the reader a more personal side of Robert Hayden.

Mitchell was inspired by his reading of the 1976 interview with Hayden to take a series of photographs, which he says he shot "from a very beautiful eucalyptus tree in front" of the Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh in Acre, Israel. Hence the images have "sacred association." One of the photographs from the series appears on page 42 and a second one on page 45. The second photograph con- [Page 5]

INTERCHANGE

tains "figures and shapes, some seeming to have African and Afro-American motifs, that prompted the thought they are suited to recollections of Bob."

No issue on Hayden would be complete without reprinting some of his poems in their entirety. The Editors have mined issues of World Order for poems that Hayden himself selected, or wrote, for the magazine: "The Whipping," several sections from "Words in the Mourning Time," "The Year of the Child," and "The Dawnbreaker."

"The Whipping" (page 27), which Derik Smith discusses in "Emerging from a Heart-Shape in the Dust," is autobiographical. Smith notes that "It is frantic, and I think it may be hard for some to grasp the sympathy that the speaker has for the woman doing the whipping. But I think that this captures some of Hayden's subtlety. This is not just an effort to elicit sympathy or record one simplified life-history. It is about overlapping histories and the complexities of looking back in history."

Sections V and IX from "Words in the Mourning Time" (page 39) provide a counterpoint to the 1976 interview. Section V brings alive the theme of disintegration that is central to the works of Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith from 1921 to 1957. Section IX reintroduces the poem's theme of integration, another theme in Shoghi Effendi's writings. It is "very forthright, almost a manifesto," Smith notes—and one that is grounded in the Bahá’í belief in the oneness of humankind.

"The Year of the Child" (pages 40-41) is very special to the World Order Editorial Board, who asked Hayden to write a poem for an issue devoted to the 1979 U.N. International Year of the Child. Publication of the poem was delayed until our Summer 1979 issue because Hayden was not satisfied with the poem (a word just wasn't right, he insisted).

"And all the atoms cry aloud" (pages 46-47) is the tenth section of "Words in the Mourning Time." Glenford Mitchell mentions it at the end of his reflections as a poem admitting "us into an awareness of the prospect" that Robert Hayden "perceived of a pathway toward the universal horizon that inspired his voice as it beckoned his spirit."

"The Dawnbreaker" (page 48) is one of Hayden's Bahá’í poems. It is based on the martyrdom of Hájí Sulaymán Khán, one of many followers of the Báb (the forerunner of Bahá’u’lláh) who perished after a misguided Bahá’í youth attempted to kill Náşiri’d-Dín Sháh with bird shot. The method of execution (lighted candles thrust into the flesh) was not uncommon. But in this case Hájí Sulaymán Khán himself chose this manner of martyrdom so that those who witnessed the event would "recognise the Light I have embraced." Smith feels "The Dawnbreaker" may also have been "the first poem in which Hayden began to work with Shoghi Effendi's themes of disintegration and integration and of the movement of history." Hayden's use of fire imagery may also have been inspired by Shoghi Effendi's writings, Smith adds.

On January 8, 2006, John A. Grayzel became the second person to occupy the Bahá’í Chair for Peace, the first such chair in the world, and a part of the [Page 6]

INTERCHANGE

University of Maryland’s Center for International Development and Conflict Management.

The mission of the Bahá’í Chair for Peace, according to a brochure about it, is the empirical study, objective presentation, reflective analysis, and pragmatic application of spiritual principles, especially unity in diversity and principle-based consultation, to questions of international peace, social justice, human security, and equitable access to goods, services, and knowledge. In pursuit of its objectives, the Chair studies existing and proposed approaches to establishing peace on all levels of human society. In particular, the Chair shares the experiences of the Bahá’í world community as a model for study.

Grayzel brings to the Bahá’í Chair a rich background. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University (1965, anthropology and Oriental studies); a J.D. degree, with a specialty in psychiatric law, from Stanford University Law School (1968); and a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon (1977, anthropology). He has taught international development, applied anthropology, and African studies at Boston University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Oregon, and LaSalle University in Manila. His publications include articles on conflict, ethnic identity, land tenure, and resource management.

A former U.S. Senior Foreign Service Officer and a former Mission Director to the Democratic Republic of the Congo for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Grayzel has devoted more than a quarter of a century to conflict management and international development. His work has taken him to, among other places, Fiji, India, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mongolia, the Philippines, Senegal, Thailand, Vanuatu, and Vietnam. His areas of responsibility have included governance, agriculture, natural resource management, private-sector and technology development, policy coordination, and education and training.

Grayzel succeeds Suheil Bushrui, the first occupant of the Bahá’í Chair for Peace, who retired after serving since 1993.

During its thirteen years’ existence, the Bahá’í Chair has become known for conducting and publishing research, designing and teaching courses, organizing seminars and workshops, and facilitating and participating in the application of knowledge to real-world problems.

For our readers interested in microfilm and microfiche copies of World Order, please note that such copies can now be obtained from the National Archives Publishing Company (NAPC), 300 North Zeeb Road, P.O. Box 998, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-0998, USA. The telephone number is 1-800-420-6272; the e-mail address is info@napubco.com.

ARE POLITICAL PARTIES NECESSARY?

You were truly wise to devote an entire issue of World Order [Vol. 37, No. 1] to an article of fundamental importance not only to promoting an understanding of one of the key elements of the Bahá’í administrative order but also to integrating the problem of choosing a community’s officers with concepts of governance, elections, democracy, and political science. I refer, of course, to Arash Abizadeh’s article on Bahá’í elections—“Democratic Elections without Campaigns? Normative Foundations of Bahá’í Elections.” [Page 7]

IINTERCHANGE

Before getting into the details, the author has to clear some troubling underbrush. Political scientists are particularly proud of their scientific standing in the general field of social sciences. Of course, those who are particularly wary of traditions that stand in the way of their methods are those least aware of their own firmly established traditions. Here is what Abizadeh has to say about elections:

Today it is widely assumed that elections, to count as properly democratic, must be multi-party elections in which each party's candidates compete freely for votes. . . .

This is not to say, however, that equating democratic elections with multiparty competition is beyond criticism. Many critics bemoan [that] . . . such elections yield corrupt and morally bankrupt leaders; ... that they fail to provide the electorate with any real political say or choice; ... or that modern electoral campaigns are too easily bought by money-these are all common worries. What is less common are viable alternatives to the competitive multiparty model of democratic elections.

An old chestnut has it (according to Winston Churchill) that "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government ex- cept all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

On July 7, 2006, on NPR's Washington Week, there was a lively panel discussion on just such matters in a special edition called "Is Politics Broken?" Most of the argument was about third parties (clearly an American question) or multi-party systems. The panel was more vocal about their defects than about the advantages of any of them. But one member timidly put forth this really far-out suggestion: Is there any need for parties at all? Our Founding Fathers didn't seem to think so. The rest of the group laughed indulgently and then returned to their version of reality.

But this is exactly what Abizadeh is talking about. Let us return to the passage just cited:

The Bahá’í community claims to practice such an alternative. . . . Bahá’í communities are governed by regularly elected representative institutions at local, regional (in some areas), national, and international levels. [These elections] are conducted without nominations, competitive campaigns, voting coalitions, or parties. Indeed, Bahá’í elections are governed by formal institutional rules and informal norms that specifically prohibit such familiar features of the political landscape. . . . This study seeks to explain the distinct ethical, spiritual, and pragmatic values according to which national Bahá’í electoral rules and norms are justified-to lay bare, in other words, the philosophical foundations of national Bahá’í elections.

And so Abizadeh does. He goes on to distinguish between the moral bases of these rules and the pragmatic results. The congruence between the two would be a good test for the value of any way of doing anything, but Abizadeh limits his discussion to the coherence of these values in the Bahá’í context, without ever saying, "You liberal democrats should really try it." He has the good taste not to go the triumphal route; he lets the facts speak for themselves.

For those who are reading this letter, it can in no way be a substitute for the article itself. Read it. You will be led into paths of contemplation of politico-philosophical methods that I, for one, had never dreamt of. If you are a Bahá’í, you will be grateful for this confirmation. If you are not, you will have learned something of great value.

HOWARD GAREY Burlington, Vermont

[Page 9]

Emerging from a Heart-Shape in the Dust: Maturation in the Poetics of Robert Hayden

Thirty years ago, in 1976, the significance of Robert Hayden’s contributions to the life of American letters was nationally recognized through his appointment as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. In some ways his being selected to serve in the country’s foremost literary post was the consummation of a long writing career during which Hayden proved himself to be among the most eloquent chroniclers of the American experience. Although the former poetry editor of World Order would succumb to cancer in 1980, four years after his appointment, the reputation of his art has continued to develop in the ensuing decades. Hayden’s readers have come to value his poetic voice as an illumination of history and as a window into the human psyche struggling to process the questions of identity that attend modernity. They understand that his art is the expression of an uncommon commitment to universal justice and compassion that is remarkable in its refusal of didacticism and in its allusive subtlety.

Hayden’s career began rather inauspiciously in 1940 with the publication of a collection entitled Heart-Shape in the Dust that the poet would pointedly disown later in life-refusing to allow its poems to represent his work in anthologies and, at one point, declaring plans to burn all extant copies of the book.' While most critics have followed Hayden’s lead by ignoring the volume that the poet labeled juvenilia, this first of ten collections of poetry that Hayden published deserves some attention, for it bears a perceptible, if tenuous, relationship to the work found in

1. Robert Hayden, "A Certain Vision,"" interview by Richard Layman, Collected Prose: Robert Hayden, ed. Frederick Glaysher, foreword William Meredith (Ann Arbor, MI, USA: U of Michigan P, 1984) 98.

Derik Smith, who holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, lives with his wife and two sons in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where he is an assistant professor teaching writing and humanities courses to Emirati women at Zayed University. His research interests focus on African-American literature and culture. He is working on a study of Robert Hayden’s poetry called "Love’s Lonely Offices." [Page 10]Hayden's mature corpus: It is infused with the germ of the moral sensibility that Hayden's poems would soon express with both precision and flourish. Like many of his mature poems, Hayden's early pieces spring directly from the African-American folk context that colored his upbringing. A comparative consideration of some of the Heart-Shape poems, which places these early works in direct conversation with Hayden's mature poetics, reveals much about the development and formation of the distinctive style that readers have come to associate with Hayden.

An examination of Hayden's life, coupled with the pronounced shift in his poetic register, shows that a definite transformational period took place between the publications of Heart-Shape and his second volume The Lion and the Archer in 1948.2

HAYDEN REMAINED COMMITTED TO THE PRINCIPLES OF UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD AND RACE AMITY THAT HE FULLY EMBRACED BOTH INTELLECTUALLY AND SPIRITUALLY DURING THE EARLY 1940s.

It is clear that, during the eight-year period, Hayden re-conceived his poetry in both aesthetic and ideological terms. This refashioning was decisive and singular in that his philosophy of art remained remarkably consistent during the balance of his life—despite the difficulties it would create for him during the era of the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While major African-American poets of Hayden's generation, like Gwendolyn Brooks and Melvin Tolson, began to advocate a quasiseparatist brand of black nationalism during the "movement years," Hayden remained committed to the principles of universal brotherhood and race amity that he fully embraced both intellectually and spiritually during the early 1940s. While many associated with the Black Arts Movement began to value art only insofar as it directly incited the political consciousness, he refused to part with aesthetic principles that taught that poetry should never be reduced to pure propaganda. Hayden's steadfast allegiance to his worldview led some to scorn, others to respect, and still others to scornful respect. Charting the shift in Hayden's poetry is an insightful exercise, for it helps to lay bare the reasoning that informed the poet's mature ideological and aesthetic positions.

2. See Robert Hayden, The Lion and the Archer (Nashville, TN, USA: Hemphill P, 1948).

3. The Black Arts Movement, often thought of as the artistic correlate of the Black Power movement, flourished from about 1965 to 1975. During the "movement years," Black Arts artists regularly turned to poetry to articulate their grievances against American racism and to inspire race-pride among African-Americans. Major figures of the movement, such as Amiri Baraka (né LeRoi Jones), Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, and Haki Madhubuti (né Don L. Lee), frequently wrote fiery, political poems that were incendiary in their sometimes violent rhetoric but also easily accessible to the "black masses" in their diction and content. Scholarly assessment of the Black Arts Movement is lively and diverse. While some offer stern critiques of its alleged sexism, homophobia, and racial separatism, others hail it as a movement that democratized the American literary scene by giving voice to black artists who had long been ignored by the literary establishment. For an insightful reading of Hayden's relationship to the Black Arts Movement, see James C. Hall, Mercy, Mercy Me: African-American Culture and the American Sixties (New York: Oxford UP, 2001). [Page 11]

Early Years

John Hatcher and Pontheolla T. Williams-two seminal figures in Hayden scholarship have produced accounts of Hayden's early life from which his adolescent worldview and poetry emerged. Both describe a childhood that, in its complexities and challenges, explains to some extent the sensitive genius of the mature poet. Unable to care for her eighteen-month-old son, Hayden's birth mother entrusted his upbringing in 1915 to William and Sue Ellen Hayden, a working-class couple living in the poor section of East Detroit known as Paradise Valley.

Remembrances of his formative, often turbulent, years in the Hayden household animate a significant strand of the poet's later work. "Those Winter Sundays" and "The Whipping," companion pieces in A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), are among some of Hayden's more obviously autobiographical poems. They are records of a young life that powerfully evoke a deep pain, textured and disrupted by a just-greater sense of filial gratitude and a mature compassion. The speaker of "Those Winter Sundays" feared "the chronic angers of that house," yet, looking back from the distance of adulthood, recognizes that within its walls existed the nurturing sacrifice of "love's austere and lonely offices." More affecting than the poverty that the Haydens often endured was the anger that the poet described in an interview as "tensions that kept us most of the time on the edge of some shrill domestic calamity." The sound of "domestic calamity" is heard in the similar language of "The Whipping" as a mother traps her son for a beating:

She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling boy till the stick breaks in her hand. His tears are rainy weather to woundlike memories: . . . (9-12)

These stormy remembrances are not only those of the poet-speaker who goes on to describe them with personal detail ("My head gripped in bony vise of knees"). The tears of the young sufferer also fall upon the history of his punisher who tries to hide from her own pain by administering it to her charge:

And the woman leans muttering against a tree, exhausted, purged- avenged in part for lifelong hidings she has had to bear. (21-24)

His ability to twin the fear of the child and the magnanimous understanding of the retrospective adult speaker without devaluing either sentiment demonstrates an

4. See Robert Hayden, A Ballad of Remembrance (London: Breman, 1962). 5. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Hayden's poems-other than those appearing in Heart-Shape in the Dust-come from Robert Hayden, Robert Hayden: Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher (New York: Liveright, 1985). For quotations more than two lines in length I provide line numbers but not page numbers. For poems from Heart-Shape and poems by writers other than Hayden, I provide the page number of the poem parenthetically but not line numbers. 6. Hayden, "The Poet and His Art: A Conversation," interview by Paul McCloskey, Collected Prose 138. [Page 12]abiding sensitivity that Hayden possessed from early in life. Indeed, it was his sensitivity and interest in the subtleties of the mind that partly produced the dissonance that Hayden felt in his domestic upbringing.

Born with vision severely impaired by near-sightedness, young Hayden was locked behind bulging glasses that sealed him off from the boyish activities of would-be peers. Perhaps fortunately compensated, Hayden possessed a precocious intellect that, while making him somewhat inscrutable to his relatively unlettered family, drew him into the world of books at an early age. Because he was unfit for the competitive play of youngsters, young Robert was often engrossed in texts filtered through his thick lenses. The poet described himself as a "queer sort of boy" in a ghetto environment rife with challenges for even the most well-adjusted black child. That Hayden's mature responses to his early home life do not dwell too long on his multiple difficulties reflects on William and Sue Hayden, who continually tried to support their adopted son, in spite of the difficulties of their own marriage and their inability to completely identify with the boy's bookish interests.

William Hayden was a devoted member of one of Detroit's largest Baptist churches and saw to it that his charge was reared in the fold. The role that the church played in the Hayden family dynamic is intimated by "Those Winter Sundays." The poem's speaker describes the early hours of that day of rest: His father has prepared the morning; he has not only "driven out the cold" but "polished my good shoes as well." These quiet, Sunday-morning expressions of paternal love provide comfort and ease to the speaker. Yet, more than that, these also serve as openings to the church and, tenderly wrought as they are, signify a care for the speaker's spiritual well-being. Young Hayden's relationship to his father's religion was not forced or problematic; later in life he would recall having a genuine conversion experience as a child. He became an active member of the church community, regularly participating in various Bible schools, artistic programs, and youth organizations.

Growing up in a poor, urban black family fully ensconced in the Baptist church meant that Hayden possessed the emotional and social fibers that have found their way from the lives of so many artists into the tapestry of African-American cultural expression. For Hayden, identification with African-American folkways was not difficult. His was a folk experience. Early in his career this experience yielded the

7. Pontheolla T. Williams, Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry (Urbana, IL, USA: U of Illinois P, 1987) 4. 8. Williams, Robert Hayden 9. 9. In a 1976 interview for World Order magazine (10.2 [Winter 1975-76]: 46-53) (reprinted in this issue on pages 29-38), Hayden himself says as much about his experience: "My roots are really very deep in what I like to call Afro-American folk life" (31). [Page 13]poetic output that might have been expected. With a politics somewhat influenced by Richard Wright's communism and taking aesthetic cues from Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, most of Hayden's early poems are derivative social critiques that decry American racism. Heart-Shape is largely comprised of formulaic pieces that hearken back to the Harlem Renaissance in the familiarity of their argument. "The Negro to America," for example, employs an unimaginative juxtaposition of the nation's democratic ideals with the reality of its practiced racism. The poem pivots on a worn logic that betrays no glimmer of the poetic ambition that characterizes Hayden's later verse:

But, oh, my country, You are not free So long as there's A mortgage on My liberty. (26)

A stronger piece closes Heart-Shape in the Dust. "These Are My People" is a long, sweeping poem that attempts to bring versed life to the pain and prospects of the black experience in America. Its primary speaker intermittently calls to "America"

10. In the late 1930s and the 1940s, Richard Wright was the most influential black writer in America. In essay and fiction he composed unflinching protest pieces that dramatized the need for radical transformation in American society. His masterwork, Native Son (1940), paints a pointedly brutal picture of the effects of white racism on the black psyche. At the height of his career, Wright-like many other black intellectuals of his era-aligned himself with the Communist Party, despite being critical of its failings where race was concerned.

11. Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes were among the leading poetic lights of the first widely recognized cultural movement mounted by blacks in America. The Harlem Renaissance, as that movement is known, spanned about twenty years from the mid-1910s to the mid-1930s and was animated by the work of artists living in New York City and other Northern urban centers during that period. Cullen and Hughes were central figures among a host of black essayists, playwrights, painters, sculptors, fiction writers, musicians, and other poets who self-consciously used their art to describe black life from black perspectives. Their work attempted to create a fresh representation of black humanity in an American imagination that was overrun by simplistic and malicious caricatures of mammies, brutes and darkies. The most significant anthology of the period, entitled The New Negro (1925), gathers together a diverse sampling of this art that often amounts to social criticism chronicling the history of chattel slavery in America, decrying white racism of the era and looking toward a future in which blacks would be fully recognized and respected members of American society. (In a recent World Order article, Christopher Buck offers a helpful introduction to the Harlem Renaissance through his consideration of the life and philosophy of Alain Locke, the so-called "Dean of the Harlem Renaissance" and editor of The New Negro. See Christopher Buck, "Alain Locke, Race Leader, Social Philosopher, Bahá’í Pluralist," World Order, 36.3: 7-36.) Hayden's early work was deeply influenced by the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance and rehashed the themes of social critique in which Hughes excelled, while employing traditional poetic forms which guided Cullen's work. [Page 14]in the vague voice that also sounds in "The Negro to America." The disembodied narrator sings a familiar tune:

America, America

listen to my song,

a sorrow song,

a dream song,

a hope song,

a black man’s song. (56)

However, this typical narrator gives way to the emergence of a number of voices that are somewhat more compelling in their specificity. As Hatcher points out, through its incorporation of multiple voices, the poem makes use of a trope that Hayden would employ regularly in his later work. 12 In one self-contained shard of dialogue, Hayden contrasts vernacular African-American speech with that of demeaning, economic power in order to provide a tableau through which the protest of the African-American proletariat effectively issues:

Move on, black boy,

no jobs today.

Boss, ma kids is hongry,

an the rent’s to pay.

Move on, black boy,

you ain’t ofay. 13 (60)

In form, these somewhat predictable lines anticipate the powerfully deft inclusion of character voices that Hayden later deploys in works like "Night, Death, Mississippi," "Runagate Runagate," and "Middle Passage." And, as they function in the poem, the lines do serve to capture a scene that enhances the argument of the work. Finally, however, "The Negro to America" does not manage to break free of the conventional protest mode that, by the 1940s, was artistically passé. It would not be until several years later that Hayden would abandon the stilted generalities that impair the protest poems of Heart-Shape and would proceed to infuse his work with characters bearing vivid individuality illuminating the sordid and the splendid humanity of black life.

However, within the derivative protest formula that guides "These are My People" and similar poems in Heart-Shape there appear other foreshadowing moments suggestive of the poetic worldview that would be more fully realized in Hayden’s mature verse. Of particular note is a rather open advocacy of interracial solidarity that, like other political elements of the volume, is devoid of the subtlety characteristic of the poet’s mature work. Indeed, "These Are My People" concludes with an unan-

12. See John Hatcher, From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robert Hayden (Oxford, George Ronald, 1984) 101. 13. "Ofay," a derogatory African-American slang term that was most popular in the first half of the twentieth century, means "white person." The word is rarely heard today and, perhaps too forcefully, dates the poem. [Page 15]

EMERGING FROM A HEART-SHAPE IN THE DUST

ticipated and unabashed appeal for white America's assistance in the struggle for black uplift. By way of a familial invitation, the conclusion of the poem translates the "America" that the speaker has continually addressed into a somewhat less abstract set of "white" brothers. The last lines plead:

O white brother won't you march with me? Marching, marching, marching, marching Toward the day that is to be. O white brother, won't you march with me? Take my hand and march with me. (63)

Williams links this call to Hayden's flirtations with Marxist socialism and describes it as "an appeal for black and white worker solidarity."14 Yet there is nothing in the poem itself to necessarily endorse a reading that particularizes the entreaty in terms of class rhetoric. Williams seems to stake her interpretation on a phase in Hayden's life: The poet worked in the Federal Writers Project during the depression years in which he wrote Heart-Shape." For Hayden and a significant group of aspiring artists, including most prominently-Richard Wright, the program of the Works Project Administration offered not only a living but a venue for an exchange of aesthetic and political ideas, not the least of which was communist ideology. Williams suggests that in Hayden's encounter with communism he began a journey from a racialized political consciousness to one that was influenced by class, before settling upon the universalism that would mark his mature politics. While this speculative assumption may hold some utility, there is little in "These Are My People" that suggests an overt advocacy for socialism.

The last lines of the final poem in Hayden's first collection wish for an unqualified solidarity between white and black "brothers" unified in their struggle "[t]oward the day that is to be." Although it is only vaguely intimated by the poem, that "day" seems to represent the mythic future of the folk imagination in which African-Americans enjoy the liberty, justice, equality, and so on promised in the nation's credos. Thus, at this early point in his life, while engaged in the production of classic forms of black protest poetry, Hayden already demonstrated a hopeful faith in white brothers and in the American ideal that, though modulated, remained with the poet throughout his career. While his poetry would never again articulate it in the explicit

14. Williams, Robert Hayden 18. 15. Like thousands of other artists and intellectuals in the United States during the Depression of the 1930s and the early 1940s, Hayden found employment through the work relief program known as the Works Project Administration. The WPA was a significant cultural element of the New Deal policies that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted after coming to office in 1933. As part of the Federal Writers Project-one of the WPA's five major divisions-Hayden spent two years, from 1936 to 1938, researching African-American history and folklore. This stint as an employee of the federal government figures prominently in Hayden's lifelong engagement with the materials of black history. [Page 16]language of "These Are My People," Hayden's consistent commitment to a politics that generally embraced whites was an obvious though mostly unspoken-cause of friction in his later relationship to the purveyors of the Black Arts Movement. For Williams, accounting for the uncommon good-will and trust that Hayden, as a mid-twentieth-century African-American artist, was ready to extend to white America invites a return to the poet's early life. According to Williams, Hayden claimed that his childhood on Detroit's east side was "relatively free from hard prejudice" and that a certain benevolence was extended to the Hayden family by Jews and Italians living in the area.16 For the poet, these positive interracial experiences seem to have been more affecting than the expected racist taunts and trials that he also encountered. While acknowledging that he began to feel racial prejudice more viscerally as he approached adolescence, late in life Hayden used positive terms to describe his years in a predominantly white high school that met the needs of students with severely impaired vision. Williams posits that Hayden's affirmative interracial experiences in his formative years may have helped to shape the "humanistic worldview" that was elemental in the poet's art. She also suggests that Hayden's racially heterogeneous ancestry-inherited from his biological mother whose light skin was the product of mixed parentage-played a role in the transcendence of his perspective.17

While the psychological development that Williams plots is compelling enough in logic, any brief biographical examination of African-American intellectuals demonstrates that, particularly in the Black Arts era, there was no axiomatic relationship between a personal history of positive interracial experiences, or the possession of a substantial amount of Caucasian blood, and a politics of inclusive universalism. By way of counter example, one need only consider Amiri Baraka, perhaps the most important poetic voice of the Black Arts Movement. Baraka enjoyed numerous, presumably amicable, associations with white people-including a marriage-before his attraction to a stern form of racial separatism. In spite of very different backgrounds, major black poets of the middle twentieth century, like Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Melvin Tolson, underwent transformations that served to align their ideologies with various figurations of the black nationalism that held sway at the time. For African-Americans of the period, personal history was not necessarily a good predictor of politics. That Hayden did not undergo the same type of transformation but maintained a politics of integrationism and universalism that was out of step with popular African-American politics of his era, speaks of his guarded individualism and his important period of self-discovery that occurred not long after the publication of his first volume.

16. Williams, Robert Hayden 8. 17. Williams, Robert Hayden 8. [Page 17]

Algebra and Faith

Heart-Shape in the Dust might well be characterized as a false start in an otherwise auspicious career. Indeed, Hatcher opens his chapter on the poet's first collection by admitting that a "study of the continuity of Hayden's poetry might well ignore this first volume."18 Despite the fact that Hayden adamantly shunned his early poems, going so far as to demand that editors not print them in anthologies that included his work, the noticeable break in the "continuity" of Hayden's poetry is far more a matter of style and form than it is one of subject and politics. This distinction warrants attention because if, as I have suggested, Heart-Shape is the unremarkable product of a young African American writing from the folk experience and often against the injustices of the era, Hayden's mature poetry differs only insofar as it is wrought in a much more distinctive, sophisticated poetic register. Hayden's "transformation" in the early 1940s did not remove him from the matrix of the ghetto and the Baptist Church. Rather, it allowed him to individualize that folk experience in a manner that produced important poetry. In terms of social philosophy, what was earlier an amorphous opposition to oppression-particularly in its racist forms-and a general integrationist conviction steadily grew into a theologically organized worldview founded in a belief in the oneness of humanity, yet sensitive to particularized human suffering.

The prime causes for Hayden's significant alteration in style and form and his more delicate philosophical adjustments are found in his several years as a Master's student at the University of Michigan in the early 1940s. During this critical period he encountered two forces that were to have lasting effect in his life and work: He studied under the direction of W. H. Auden, an undisputed master of poetic technique often considered the finest English poet of the twentieth century, and he became familiar with the Bahá’í Faith. Together, these two influences combined to produce the poetic voice that speaks with signature compassion and precision in Hayden's mature works. From Auden, the young poet assimilated a general poetic theory that he was to draw on throughout his career. In the Bahá’í Faith, Hayden discovered a comprehensive philosophical framework in which his existential, historical, and political concerns were eventually situated and synthesized.

Besides being inspired by the Englishman's ability and reputation, Hayden received from Auden a mathematical metaphor for poetry that made a singular impression. As Hayden recounted it more than thirty years later, there were two [Page 18]categories of poems for Auden, and Hayden himself had written poems that fell into both:

There were some that he liked very much, and some he didn't like at all. The ones he liked he said were poems that were like algebra, in which you were solving for X. He said that was always the best kind of poetry, whereas there were other poems that were like arithmetic: you add them up and get the sum and that's all there is to it. In the other kind of poetry you have to work; you have to try and find the unknown. . . . I have remembered that ever since he said it. 19

Of course, all mathematics begins with the simplest forms of arithmetic, and the most abstruse algebraic equations are solved only through combinations of elementary computation. In artistic terms, arithmetic amounts to simple, singular meaning. Poetry becomes algebraic when meaning is proliferated. When a poem produces multiple meanings that play upon themselves to generate more meaning, an algebraic poetics is at work.

In Heart-Shape Hayden was already producing some poems that were "like algebra" in their allusive style and their manner of "solving for X." Though hardly avant-garde in form or theme, the short poem "Old Woman with Violets" is among them:

Quiet and alone she stands Within the whirling market-place, Holding the spring in winter hands And April's shadow in her face. (54)

Unlike some of his early work, in this piece Hayden draws a specific image in which meanings can accrue. It is concentrated, yet open. (The poem anticipates more ambitious later works, like "The Rag Man" and "The Tattooed Man," which take the evocative materiality of a single character as their point of departure.) It possesses some of the specificity that Hayden's early "race" poems do not. The lack of particularity that compromises the Heart-Shape poems dealing with African-American subject matter is striking when compared with similarly themed works he would pen later. The weak arguments of poems like "These Are My People" and "The Negro in America" are made through the statements of disembodied voices and by reference to the generic plight of faceless black figures. These poems are equally hamstrung by didactic forms of protest rendered in an arithmetic register that Hayden foreswore in his mature writing.

Arithmetic also hampers less explicit protest poems like "Southern Moonlight," which engages the nexus of race and sexuality in the voice of a white woman speaker addressing a lunar audience:

Moon, moon, Put out your light, For, oh my lover Comes to me tonight.

19. Hayden, "A Certain Vision," Collected Prose 99-100. [Page 19]

EMERGING FROM A HEART-SHAPE IN THE DUST

That none may see- Oh, moon, moon, hide your light- That he is black And I am white.

The poem evokes the taboo of love and sexuality that crosses racial boundaries. But it does little more than intimate an amorphous danger that accompanies such transgressions in the American South. In itself, the poem does not produce layered meanings. The white speaker and her black lover are ciphers upon which the poem's reader must independently drape personality and motivation.

To understand the weakness of "Southern Moonlight," one might compare its blank-faced figures to the vivid characters that appear in the early work of Hayden's contemporary, Gwendolyn Brooks. Brooks's treatment of interracial sexual liaison in "Ballad of Pearl May Lee"-appearing in A Street in Bronzeville (1945)—is a textured elaboration on the subject. She produces her rich exploration within the drama of a triangle involving a black woman, her black lover, and his mortal infidelity in the arms of a white woman. Among other things, the poem investigates the mythic American narratives of hypersexual black masculinity and cherished white womanhood, while foregrounding the perspective of the jilted black woman narrator, Pearl May. Following her encounter with Sammy, Pearl May's lover, the poem's white temptress is induced by vindictive shame to claim that she was raped. Predictably, Sammy is lynched. But the poem does not yield a simple denunciation of this injustice. Instead, it focuses on the fluctuating emotion of the narrator who claims to find a harrowing form of revenge in the execution of her unfaithful lover. The perverse delight of the lynchers carries into the emotion of the cheated speaker:

And I was laughing, down at my house. Laughing fit to kill. You got what you wanted for dinner, But brother you paid the bill.

The large questions of justice and the complexity of interracial concourse in America are framed by the particular and nuanced experience of Pearl May Lee.

Some twenty-five years after the appearance of "Southern Moonlight," Hayden returned to the subject with which he had fumbled in his apprentice volume, this time handling it with the deftness that Brooks brought to her poem. First published in his Selected Poems (1966), "The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield" is a contemplation of interracial love using the algebraic poetics that Hayden consistently deployed in his later work. Although the poems are separated by a significant period of time and several volumes, because of their similar theme, "Southern Moonlight" and "The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield" produce a convenient comparative framework by which to measure the maturation that occurred in Hayden's poetics after the mid 1940s. Moreover, not only does "The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield" seem to be something of a response to his earlier attempt, but also, titled as the ballad of a woman with a tripartite name, Hayden may have intended the piece as a reply to Brooks' "Ballad of Pearl May Lee." [Page 20]As in Brooks's poem, the title character in Hayden's verse narrative is a black woman:

She grew up in the bedeviled southern wilderness, but had not been a slave, she said, because her father wept and set her mother free" (1-3).

However, unlike the poems that Hayden and Brooks wrote in the 1940s on the pairing of a black man and white woman, Hayden's later poem alters the terms of interracial love by depicting the romance of this mixed-blood black woman and her white partner.

Comparing "Southern Moonlight" to "The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield," we immediately recognize Hayden's departure from an arithmetic poetics in the latter poem's free verse and meter which—like almost all of Hayden's later work—differs starkly from the rigid expectations of the ABXB quatrain pattern that organized "Southern Moonlight." Flashes of Hayden's deliberate avoidance of arithmetical poetics are also found in his delicate approach to the subject of race as it figures in the romance. Although it produces the tension in the work, the race of the central characters is never explicitly stated. The poem's reader must decipher Sue Ellen's racial composition knowing only that "her father wept and set her mother free." And, though a telling hint is provided by Hayden when he mentions the "blue eyes" of Sue Ellen's lover, even this is more algebraic than the blunt point of information with which "Southern Moonlight" closes— ... he is black And I am white.

More important than his developed penchant for allusiveness and richly elusive complexity that open up meaning in his mature poems, Hayden's move toward the use of the particular, rather than the generic, provided compelling substance in his post-Heart-Shape work on racial subject matter. Like Brooks, Hayden learned to produce character-driven poems that illuminated the African-American experience through specificity; it was within the particularity of Hayden's characters, heroic and plebeian rather than in polemic—that his racial politics, his protests and his affirmations, were implicitly born out. "The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield" is among those character poems that help to lay bare the racial ideology that subtly informs Hayden's later works. The poem's plot models the experience of Hayden's adoptive mother who, while still a young woman bearing the name that appears in the poem's title, fell deeply in love with a white man she grew to know while working aboard a Southern riverboat.20 Their romance was, of course, foredoomed; they were "fugitives whose dangerous only hidingplace / was love." The poet claimed that Sue Hayden was never able to relinquish attachment to this love and that "Until her dying-bed, she cursed the circumstance."

20. See Hatcher, From the Auroral Darkness 7-8. [Page 21]

EMERGING FROM A HEART-SHAPE IN THE DUST

In spite of the tragic mulatto trappings of such a narrative, Hayden's handling of the material manages to portray love across the boundaries of race in sympathetic, cautiously hopeful, terms that contrast with the darkness of Brooks' "Ballad of Pearl May Lee." Her text suggests that interracial attraction provokes a certain madness in all who are in its proximity: The white woman who accuses Sammy of rape just moments after their passion appears the victim of a schizophrenia of lust and shame; Sammy's recklessly uninhibited desire to possess white womanhood is matched by the unchecked and perversely euphoric-retributive violence of the white lynchers; and, feigned or no, the amused satisfaction with which Pearl May describes Sammy's punishment for betrayal indicates that she has been pushed into a delirium by the taboo affair. It is a chillingly chaotic view of a sexualized form of race integration.

Although, finally, very different from the race politics of Brooks' poem, Hayden's portrayal of interracial attraction is no easy celebration of integration. Like Brooks, Hayden gives his poem a sense of chaos and closes it with a broken relationship and a scarred black woman. But the frame of reference in Hayden's poem serves to curse "the circumstance" of the relationship rather than the relationship itself. Unlike its depiction in Brooks' poem, which is problematically transgressive not only because it is interracial but also because it is adulterous, in "The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield" there is nothing sinister in the interracial congress at its center.

IN "THE BALLAD OF SUE ELLEN WESTERFIELD, HAYDEN IS CAREFUL TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE HISTORICALLY FRAUGHT DIMENSIONS OF ANY SEXUALLY CHARGED BLACK/WHITE RELATIONSHIP.

Still, Hayden is careful to acknowledge the historically fraught dimensions of any sexually charged black/white relationship. Indeed, as mentioned above, the poem opens with reference to Sue Ellen's slave-owning father who "wept and set her mother free." But it is apparent that Hayden does not want to give the poem over too easily to a pat interpretation that finds Sue Ellen simply bowing to a new slavery in her relationship to a white lover who necessarily evokes her slave-master father. Hayden is exacting in his effort to demonstrate that Sue Ellen and her man are coequals in love and that their love is not fully controlled by the sociohistorical template in which it exists. She possessed a rankling cold sardonic pride that gave a knife-edge to her comeliness (7-9) and kept most men at a threatened distance. But for her lover she softened: "He smiled and joshed, his voice quickening her." A description of male flirtation can hardly be made in more good-natured and innocent terms. Hayden's use of the delicately benign verb "josh" is part of his attempt to confer a sense of purity, of

21. Though both are "scarred" dramatically, it is worth noting that Brooks' heroine is hurt because of a black man's willingness to risk the mortal consequences of interracial congress, while Hayden's is broken because of a white man's inability to endure the hazards of an illicit relationship. [Page 22]equal reciprocity to this burdened relationship of the antebellum/reconstruction South. The righteous intentions of this uncommon white man ("whose name she’d vowed she would not speak again / till after Jordan"), and the quality of his relationship with Sue Ellen is further intimated in a scene at the heart of the poem in which a fire breaks out aboard their steamer:

The crazing horrors of that summer night, the swifting flames, he fought his way to her, the savaging panic, and helped her swim to shore" (23-25)

In selfless and foreshadowing-fashion the lovers momentarily part after this heroic rescue and, in the midst of the encompassing confusion, help others. But Sue Ellen is dazed, awash in the disorienting swirl about her—until her love returns:

blankness lostness nothingness for her until his arms had lifted her into wild and secret dark" (38-40).

The fire, the chaos of Hayden’s poem, is the "circumstance"; it is the mise-en-scène that everywhere surrounds the authenticity of this interracial love. Sue Ellen and her man are trapped within history’s inferno and its determining effect upon the society in which they must survive. Finally, they do not possess the courage to sustain their love through "cursed" circumstance. With the ambiguous tears of Sue Ellen’s slave-master-father appearing in the eyes of her lover as they part, the poem’s concluding lines return history to the center of this romance, even as they lament the loss of this uncommon love:

They kissed and said farewell at last. He wept as had her father once. They kissed and said farewell. Until her dying-bed, She cursed the circumstance. (49-53)

Suffused with history, fully animated by the particularity of its characters, and freed from the constraints of rigid formal devices, "The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield" is algebra to the arithmetic of "Southern Moonlight." The comparison of the two poems illustrates the dramatic shift in Hayden’s poetics after Heart-Shape. Aside from thematic kinship, there is little that associates the earlier poems with the body of work that came after. However, the dramatic stylistic transformation in Hayden’s writing was not matched by a comparable shift in subject or politics. "The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield" demonstrates the manner in which Hayden’s interest in African America and his integrationism, so explicitly articulated in "These Are My People" ("O white brother / won’t you march with me?"), found similar, but more subtle and complicated, expression in the poet’s maturity. Based upon the experience of his adoptive mother, the poem is one of Hayden’s many vibrant examinations of the figuration of race in America. Like all of these poems it is far from polemical. It is historical rather than political.

But, of course, no history is without its politics, and first published in 1962—three years before Baraka would divorce his white wife, arguably, in order to be a more authentic nationalist—"The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield" makes a political statement about interracial love, and by extension racial integration, that is quite [Page 23]different from the one made by Gwendolyn Brooks in "Ballad of Pearl May Lee." The pessimism of Brooks' poem, composed some twenty years before the nationalist awakening she would undergo, was to be echoed in the Black Arts Movement. Her approach obviously contrasts with the hopeful calls for interracial solidarity made by young Hayden in the very early 1940s and with the more remarkable poetic expressions of his steadfast belief in the possibility-indeed the necessity-of productive interracial relationships in the 1960s and 1970s.

As the civil-rights movement developed in the 1940s and 1950s, hopeful African American writers were relatively liberal in their appeals for white assistance in the struggle for equality. For example, in 1944 Georgia Johnson, poetic matriarch of the Harlem Renaissance, published her poem "Interracial" in the major black journal Phylon. Like Hayden's "These Are my People," her poem closes with an unabashed appeal for interracial cooperation: "Oh let's build bridges everywhere / And span the gulf of challenge there." Two decades later, however, amid general disappointment in the slow progress affected by the civil rights movement, such hopeful African-American rhetoric had been replaced by suspicion and repudiation of most things "white."

With its emphasis on the lack of coercion and on heroic righteousness in the interracial love of "The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield," Hayden strikes a position that was very much at odds with the race politics of 1960s black nationalism, so emblematically articulated in terms of interracial romantic attraction by Baraka's play Dutchman (1964), which, like Brooks' poem, associates such coming together with homicidal insanity and chaos.

HAYDEN'S CONSISTENTLY HOPEFUL VISION

First evidenced in his earliest poems, Hayden's consistently hopeful vision of the prospects for variegated forms of interracial solidarity manifests itself in his post-Heart-Shape work as a seemingly "old-school" faith in the possibility of peaceable and generative interracial companionship. As prominent black nationalists like Ron Karenga called for "assassins" poems," Hayden was often writing amity poems that, in subject and theme, called attention to the common humanity of blacks and whites.

OF THE PROSPECTS FOR VARIEGATED FORMS OF INTERRACIAL SOLIDARITY MANIFESTS ITSELF IN HIS POST-HEART-SHAPE WORK AS A SEEMINGLY "OLD-SCHOOL" FAITH IN THE POSSIBILITY OF PEACEABLE AND GENERATIVE INTERRACIAL COMPANIONSHIP.

Accounting for Hayden's attachment to a social philosophy that was more in step with the optimistic expressions of African-American artists of the 1940s and earlier, even as he entered into his poetic maturity during the period that would eventually give rise to militant black separatism, requires recollection of that transformative moment in Hayden's life in which he came upon not only W. H. Auden but also the Bahá’í Faith.

The Poetics of an African-American Bahá’í

While Auden helped catalyze Hayden's major shift in style, it was the young religion from the Near East that solidified his commitment to integrationism and cultivated [Page 24]his universalism. Led to investigate the Faith by his wife Erma, Robert Hayden became a Bahá’í in 1943. It was no capricious decision on his part. He studied the religion for more than a year before officially declaring himself a believer.22 The hard independence that was so much a part of Hayden's character was tested by the newfound religion. "I'm not a joiner," he once declared in an interview. "I don't get involved with groups. The Bahá’í Faith is about the only organized body I can stand. I cherish my individuality and don't want to be a conformist except (paradoxically) on my own terms."23 Hayden's willingness to forgo the unique comforts of philosophical independence was prompted by what he described in unqualified language, as his discovery of "the truth."24 It was a truth that, in many respects, did not require Hayden to alter his values. Intellectually, there was little conforming required of the poet. His Baptist upbringing bequeathed him a faith in the existence of divinity and in the efficacy of the station of prophethood that linked humanity to its God.25 Hayden's integrationist political leaning, apparent in his first volume of poetry, was confirmed and augmented by the universalism of the Bahá’í Faith. Amplified through their resonance with the teachings of this religion, Hayden's personal beliefs grew into the worldview expressed in his mature writing.

Hayden assimilated the principles of the Bahá’í Faith into his own thinking so fully that any attempt to extricate one from the other would be a distorting imposition. The poet's own comments on the subject suggest a reciprocal relationship between his personal convictions and the teachings of his newly adopted religion:

I believe in the essential oneness of all people and I believe in the basic unity of all religions. I don't believe that races are important; I think that people are important. I'm very suspicious of any form of ethnicity or nationalism; I think that these things are very crippling and are very divisive. These are all Bahá’í points of view, and my work grows out of this vision.26

For the poet there seemed to be little that distinguished his own point of view from a Bahá’í vision. Indeed, in the years immediately following his conversion, Hayden could not even see the influence of the Faith on his work. It was only later that he realized that his religious belief gave him "a base, a focus" even in the period of his early maturity in which Bahá’í allusions do not appear in the poems.27 Once

22. See Hatcher, From the Auroral Darkness 17. 23. Hayden, "A Conversation During the Bicentennial," interview by Glenford E. Mitchell, Collected Prose 82. For the entire interview, see pages 29-38 in this issue. 24. Hayden, "A Certain Vision,"" Collected Prose 111. 25. That is not to say that Hayden was a religious exemplar. His was a struggle in faith-arduous and committed-that his poetry documents with grace. Indeed, it is the frailty of faith-the falling and then rising-to which Hayden admits in his poetry, that allows his readers to observe and respect his religiousness without the feeling that they are being preached at. For examples of his poetic grappling with faith, read "As My Blood Drawn," "Ice Storm," "Words in the Mourning Time," and "Theory of Evil" among others. 26. Hayden, "A Certain Vision," Collected Prose 111. 27. Hayden, "From The Life: Some Remembrances," Collected Prose 27. [Page 25]

EMERGING FROM A HEART-SHAPE IN THE DUST

Hayden adopted the Bahá’í Faith, the transcendence of the religion-its devaluation of material categories of identity-meant that his belief in principled integrationism was supported by religious conviction. Hayden's racial politics became something more than a position discursively established upon an intellectual assessment of American society. The poet was able to link his politics to an existential belief system that had produced the organized religion with which he was now affiliated.

Although the Bahá’í Faith possessed a complexly comprehensive theology productively applicable to all aspects of human sociology, the religion's primary and lofty mandate-to establish the unity of humankind-ensured that, from its earliest days in the racially superconscious American context, race unity was its priority issue. The explicit guidance of the religion's leaders ushered the small community toward its ideals. Shoghi Effendi, head of the Faith from 1921 until his death in 1957, addressed American Bahá’ís in a 1938 letter, emphasizing the importance of eliminating racism within its own ranks:

Freedom from racial prejudice, in any of its forms, should, at such a time as this when an increasingly large section of the human race is falling a victim to its devastating ferocity, be adopted as the watchword of the entire body of the American believers, in whichever state they reside, in whatever circles they move, whatever their age, traditions, tastes, and habits. 28

Shoghi Effendi consistently encouraged Bahá’ís to conform their public and personal lives to the requirements of such belief rather than to the dictates of a racist society. Earlier in the century, during His visit to North America, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of the religion's founder and its leader at the time, insisted that blacks and whites regard themselves as brothers and sisters in a single human family. Separatism, however manifested, was not admissible in Hayden's new Faith. Indeed, having declared that it would "abolish differences and disputes between black and white,"" ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had in 1912 urged interracial marriage, going so far as to essentially arrange an illustrative union between a prominent African-American Bahá’í and the English woman to whom he would remain wedded for life. 29

28. Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, Ist pocket-size ed. (Wilmette, IL, USA: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1990, 2003 printing) 36.

29. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to [Charles Mason Remey], in Louis G. Gregory, A Heavenly Vista: The Pilgrimage of Louis G. Gregory (Washington, D.C.: n.p., n.d.) 31, quoted in Gayle Morrison, To Move the World: Louis G. Gregory and the Advancement of Racial Unity in America, foreword Glenford E. Mitchell (Wilmette, IL, USA: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1982, 1995 printing) 64. The marriage was between Louis G. Gregory (the son of slaves, an attorney with a 1902 law degree from Howard University, and a tireless Bahá’í administrator, lecturer, writer, and proponent of race unity, from 1909, when he became a Bahá’í, until his death in 1951), and Louisa Mathew (an Englishwoman who had studied at Cambridge University and an indefatigable teacher of the Bahá’í Faith, especially in Europe). [Page 26]The subtle but inescapable politics of "The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield" is, then, a key element of Hayden's fully realized poetic voice. For the poet, universalism and more nationally specific integrationism—became a religiously sanctioned politics that put him at cross-purposes with the mainstream of African-American literary production, as it came to define itself during the 1960s (to say nothing of "mainstream America"). Hayden adamantly believed that humanity was, in spiritual reality, an indivisible collectivity that had imposed division upon itself.

Remembering the Poet

In celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Robert Hayden's appointment to the position of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, we should call to mind the unique and broad achievement of his career. Hayden became the first African American recognized with the nation's most prestigious poetic honor. But this was the crescendo that sounded only after thirty years of often lonely and misunderstood commitment to a rigorous poetics, born in the hardness of a Depression Era ghetto and cultivated into an anomalous expression of universal compassion. The story of Hayden's development through the conventions of vague protest and into the vivid specificity of his mature verse reveals the artist as craftsman and believer. Yet it should also be inspiring, for it suggests the possibility of simple improvement—that the pedestrian can be transformed into the majestic. Hayden's rise to poetic achievement was not magical or convenient. It was made possible through tireless revision and through attention to each syllable balanced upon each line. And, perhaps, the arc of Hayden's development is made more heartening because the poet's ethic of improvement rendered increasingly eloquent his calls to justice and love. "Words in the Mourning Time," one of the great works of Hayden's corpus, twice entreats its audience to "master now love's instruments." Considered against a reading of Hayden's life work, this summons is both ironic and fitting. The irony rests in the delays that beset the poet in his journey toward mastership and recognition—Hayden knew better than most that mastery takes time and toil. Yet the urgent, uncompromising "now" of this call to humanity should also be expected from Hayden, for everywhere in his work one feels the poet placing the immediate demand for improvement and commitment upon himself before all others. Few poets have handled the instruments of craft and love with Hayden's dexterity. His astute readers sense this and continually return to his poems charting the path to betterment. [Page 27]

The Whipping

The old woman across the way is whipping the boy again and shouting to the neighborhood her goodness and his wrongs.

Wildly he crashes through elephant ears, pleads in dusty zinnias, while she in spite of crippling fat pursues and corners him.

She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling boy till the stick breaks in her hand. His tears are rainy weather to woundlike memories:

My head gripped in bony vise of knees, the writhing struggle to wrench free, the blows, the fear worse than blows that hateful Words could bring, the face that I no longer knew or loved...

Well, it is over now, it is over, and the boy sobs in his room,

And the woman leans muttering against a tree, exhausted, purged- avenged in part for lifelong hidings she has had to bear.

-ROBERT HAYDEN

Reprinted from World Order 1.2 (Winter 1966): 33. Copyright 1966 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. The poem is from Robert Hayden's Selected Poems and is reprinted by permission of October House. [Page 29]

Robert Hayden: Speaking across Three Decades

Robert Hayden must be judged among the finest modern American poets. His rich body of work is a study in compassion and craftsmanship that spoke eloquently during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Like many great artists, the influence of his work has only grown in the years since his pen fell silent in 1980. Today, some twenty-six years after his death, Hayden's poems are read in university courses throughout the world; he is included in all major anthologies of American poetry; and the echo of his verse can be heard in some of the most important contemporary African-American poets.

Hayden's artistic vision was deeply rooted in what he called the "Afro-American folk life." Indeed, his was a career-long poetic engagement with the African-American experience. Many of Hayden's poems emerge from his Depression-era childhood and adolescence in the rough, vibrant section of black Detroit then known as Paradise Valley. Others are earnest, often painful, explorations of the racial discord he observed for more than twenty years as an overworked professor at Fisk University in segregated Nashville. Still more are skillful chronicles of black history that have earned him a reputation as African America's great poet-historiographer.

Yet Hayden shunned what he deemed to be the circumscribed category of "black poet." In his corpus and in prose statements, Hayden made clear his commitment to a poetics that was particularized in the African-American experience but that addressed concerns that were ultimately and simply human. Several of his poems explicitly demonstrate that this humanism was in large part a function of his firm belief in the existential and social principles of the Bahá’í Faith-the religion that his wife, Erma, helped him embrace as a young man.

By insistently, sometimes precariously, balancing his devotion to black folk-life and his rigorous universalism, Hayden has frustrated some. But many more have appreciated his moral sensibility and celebrated the poetry that it produced. During his career, Hayden's work was honored in many forums: He was awarded the Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts; he was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Poets; his collection, American Journal, was nominated for a National Book Award; and in 1976, the same year that he was persuaded to sit down for the interview reprinted below, Hayden became the first African-American appointed as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. [Page 30]

INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT HAYDEN

The following interview, originally published in World Order thirty years ago, suggests that Hayden possessed an intellectual temperament befitting an American Poet Laureate.' Taking place in 1976 on the eve the Bicentennial of the United States, Hayden's conversation with Glenford E. Mitchell, the managing editor of the magazine at the time, reveals an artist profoundly engaged with the mythos and the ethics of his country. Although it does not dwell long on the magic of poetry, or on the details of Hayden's craft, the interview furnishes a textured sense of the man and his mind. Mitchell directs the poet toward large questions of identity, of history, and of faith all set in the American context. In the responses that Hayden provides, we witness the generous and nuanced worldview that he so richly expressed in ten volumes of poetry. As in his poems, here Hayden formulates an unflinching critique of America's moral failings-its materialism, its practiced injustice, and its often-bloody history. Yet, always wary of polemic, the poet soberly counterweighs his indictments by citing America's moral achievements and articulating his faith in the nation's-and in humanity's-capacity to create a society in which "man," as he wrote in "Words in the Mourning Time," "is neither gook nigger honkey wop nor kike / but man / permitted to be man."

As the reputation of Hayden's poetry has continued to grow, so too has the value of the dialogue presented here. The three decades that have passed since Hayden gave this interview have served only to deepen the sense of urgency that the Poet Laureate originally brought to his ideas. The problems and prospects that animated his thinking are as germane today as they were in 1976. Indeed, during the last thirty years, Robert Hayden has become an increasingly prominent cultural figure precisely because his words remain relevant. It is time we read them again.

-DERIK SMITH

INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT HAYDEN

Robert Hayden is a poet. He is also a professor of English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As he put it, "I am a poet who teaches in order to earn a living so that he can write a poem or two now and then. I was born and raised

1. The interview was published in World Order 10.2 (Winter 1975-76): 46-53 in a section called "Conversations with Americans." Setting out to find out what thoughtful citizens thought of "themselves and of their country on the occasion of the U.S. Bicentennial," the Editors chose a "variegated sample of its citizenry, people representing various ethnic, cultural, professional, and economic backgrounds. These included a female dean of a law school (Dorothy W. Nelson), an African-American poet (Robert Hayden), a Japanese architect (Shinji Yamamoto), a Chicano artist (David Villaseñor), and a New York businesswoman (Mildred Mottahedeh). Portions of the interview with Hayden have been reprinted in Collected Prose: Robert Hayden, ed. Frederick Glaysher (New York: Liveright, 1985) 79-89. [Page 31]

INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT HAYDEN

in the slums of Detroit. My family was poor, hard working, with no education. But they wanted me to have an education and sacrificed and helped me to go to college. My roots are really very deep in what I like to call Afro-American folk life." Mr. Hayden was recently a poet-in-residence at Connecticut College and has read poetry at many colleges and universities, including Yale, Brown, and Iowa. He is a con- sultant and editor for Scott, Foresman. In 1971 he was awarded the Russell Loines Award for poetry by the National Institute of Arts and Letters and in 1975 received an award from the Academy of American Poets. Mr. Hayden's works include The Night-Blooming Cereus, Words in the Mourning Time, Kalaeidoscope, Selected Poems, and Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems, recently published.² He is included in Interviews with Black Writers and reads his poetry in volume three of Today's Poets. He and his wife, Erma, a pianist, live in Ann Arbor [Michigan].³

We interviewed Mr. Hayden at a hotel in Evanston, [Illinois,] where he stopped for a few days on his way home from a visit to San Francisco. The city had evidently made a deep impression on him. Usually reserved in manner, he became animated in talking about his experiences there. We wanted to take advantage of his mood and deferred questions about himself and his work to ask him about America.

"The country is getting ready to celebrate the Bicentennial of its founding,” we said. “What does America mean to you? Are you proud to be an American?"

"Well, it means a great deal to me," he said, "and I want to try to answer that question as carefully as I can. I wouldn't say that I am proud exactly, for I regard racial and national pride as a rather dubious value, as something which tends to be divisive to exclude. America is home to me, the country in which I can work most effectively. Although, as the poet Claude McKay said, 'She feeds me bread of bitterness,' I have a deep love for my country; I feel very much a part of it despite some sense of alienation. It's an emotional frame of reference for me, and I feel deeply involved with the fate of the country."

2. Hayden's complete works include Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), The Lion and the Archer (1948), Figure of Time: Poems (1955), A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), Selected Poems (1966), Words in the Mourning Time (1970), The Night-Blooming Cereus (1972), Angle of Ascent (1975), American Journal (1978, 1982), and Collected Prose (1984). In 1976 Hayden edited a collection of poems by African Americans entitled Kalaeidoscope: Poems by American Negro Poets.

3. Hayden lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, until his death on February 25, 1980. On the day before his death, the University of Michigan's Center for Afro-American and African Studies honored him with "A Tribute to Robert Hayden," a day including tributes, drama, music, and discussions and readings of his poems.

4. For Glenford Mitchell's reminiscences about Hayden and about the 1976 interview, see pp. 43-45.

5. Claude McKay (1890-1948), a black writer born in Jamaica, was a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His important volume of poetry, Harlem Shadows, was published in 1922, and Alain Locke prominently included his poems in the influential Harlem Renaissance anthology The New Negro, published in 1925. [Page 32]

INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT HAYDEN

"What is the meaning of America's past to you?"

"That calls for a rather complicated answer. I am somewhat history oriented and have thought much and written about certain aspects of our past. The past is for most Americans, unfortunately, rather meaningless. But some of us are aware of it as a long, tortuous, and often bloody process of becoming, of psychic evolution- a process continuing today and, as a result of worldwide stress, gaining in momentum. And it has required, in almost every generation, a clarification, a redefinition of the concepts, principles, abstractions, if you will, which we have believed essential to our development as a nation. The concepts of freedom and democracy, the concepts of the individual and individual rights, even the definition of 'human' are different now from what they were two hundred years ago. Slaves and Indians in the eighteenth century, for example, were hardly regarded as human. Consider also the status of women then. We, in our times, are obligated to go on with the process of redefinition. We are still struggling with the evils of our past, but we have also inherited ideals which we are obligated to clarify and implement."

Following a pause, he asked, "Is that too complicated?"

We pressed for more comment. "Has America fulfilled the promise of its past?" we asked.

"Well, yes and no. I think it's too easy to generalize and say no. I should say as a sort of preface that I don't feel our past is to be honored and revered by restaging the Boston Tea Party or the Battle of Bunker Hill. That seems to me mere jingoism. I should say, perhaps tangentially at this point, that our glorious past was not all that glorious anyway. Imagine the irony of slaves and Indians fighting to free an America which considered them brutes at best, and at worst devils. And how can we overlook the waste and exploitation of human and natural resources in the name of progress and 'Manifest Destiny.' But to get on with the question you asked, I would say yes, the promise of the past has been fulfilled in significant ways-most significantly in terms of individual freedom. But I hasten to add that freedom is always endangered, always threatened. Many aspects of the promise of the past have never been realized because we have only paid lip service to the ideals of justice and equality and humanity which we claim are fundamental to our way of life. We have allowed reactionaries to subvert us in too many instances."

We wanted Mr. Hayden to elaborate on his reference to reactionary forces.

"I don't want to get involved in name calling," he said, "but I am thinking of all of those organizations and demagogues that stand in the way of a broader development of our institutions; of those who are opposed to other people and groups of people on the basis of color, religion, national origin, or things of that type; of those who attempt-and today too often succeed-to control and suppress, to destroy in order to shore up a tottering power structure. This is what I mean by reactionary forces: those forces which really do stand in the way of real social and spiritual progress. I think we all know who they are." [Page 33]

INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT HAYDEN

"Do you love the land?"

"Indeed, I do. Indeed, I do," was his unequivocal reply. "I have traveled extensively throughout the country, and I have lived in several different regions of the country. Physically, it's a spectacular country, with everything in it from deserts to the most lush gardens. It's full of dramatic contrasts and is often incredibly beautiful-the Far West, for example, especially San Francisco. I am always impressed with the variety and the individual qualities which the various regions of the country have, and I have tried to write poems about parts of the country I have experienced. It's a very hard thing to do. The land is as varied as the people, and there is no one thing you can say about it. Parts of it are being ruined, as we know, in the name of industrial progress. I find this highly symbolic of our aggressive utilitarianism."

We then asked, "With whom or with what do you identify?"

"That's really a very hard question. Obviously, I identify with Bahá’ís-and with other artists, and with the kind of people with whom I grew up, poor people, working-class people. I tend to identify with anything which is human, drawing the line of course against those people who are cruel and rapacious and so on. I have a very deep feeling about humanity." He paused, but was clearly not finished with his remarks, and continued. "I'm not a joiner. I don't get involved with groups. The Bahá’í Faith is about the only organized body I can stand. I cherish my individuality and don't want to be a conformist except (paradoxically) on my own terms. But I care about people, respond to whatever is human. If I didn't feel that way, how could I write? What would I write about?"

"What grieves you about America?"

He took a moment to collect his thoughts and, while raising his glance to the ceiling, said, "Oh, there are many things that grieve me. As a matter of fact, it would take me hours to discuss them. But I think that the racial situation grieves me most, because it is so wasteful and frustrating, so vicious and irrational. As an old friend of mine once said, 'Races are not important, but people are.' We don't have a sense of this in America.

"Another thing that deeply grieves me is our worship of power and technology, our belief that more and more is better, and our failure to honor any kind of spiritual vision. For example, the arts in America exist pretty largely as entertainment. The artist in this country has a kind of marginal existence, and unless he is an entertainer or unless he does something sensational and gets his name in the paper, there doesn't seem to be much place for him. There are no poets in the government that I know of. There are no artists of any kind holding responsible government positions. One reason for this is that there is a great suspicion and distrust of the arts; and, as I say, since the arts do involve the spiritual and do involve spiritual vision, there is not much concern with that." [Page 34]

INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT HAYDEN

"I think what it really all comes down to, if you think of the racial situation and the position of the artist in society and you think of our rampant technology- that what it comes down to is wastefulness and exploitation, waste of human and natural resources, and of spiritual resources. This is very terrible, and I think more and more people are feeling this way and that we have got to put an end to it, and the only way we can put an end to it, of course, is to have a brand new vision of what we are."

"What would you change in America?"

"Attitudes." He said it with such finality as to leave no doubt that he had pondered the question and drawn his conclusion long ago. "I would hope," he continued, "that we could achieve new concepts of what it is to be human-a new vision of our relationship to God, to one another. Basically, a change of heart. Everything would follow from that. Anything else, it seems to me, is a stopgap measure. Unless there is an absolute, fundamental change in our attitudes toward one another, present evils will continue, will grow worse. A difficult task, this changing of attitudes, but our survival depends on it."

"Do you see this fundamental change taking place?"

"In the minds and hearts of spiritually mature people it is. Many of them seem to be questioning accepted ideas and rejecting old assumptions once considered beyond question. I'd say the various liberation movements are instances of this. Everything is under scrutiny today; everything is in ferment. For there has been a new release of spiritual energy in the world, a galvanizing force which nothing can deter. Bahá’ís know its source to be Bahá’u’lláh. It's impelling all of us toward a new consciousness.

"Now it is very difficult to change, and if the change involves some material object or if it involves the damming of a river or putting up of a building, that could be done with no problem. But when it comes to changing attitudes and when it comes to gaining new concepts, it is very difficult. I think that time is running out, and we are being forced to rethink our values and redefine ourselves, our goals, our country, whatever."

"Do you think that a redefinition is possible to humanity or at least to America now?"

"I think so. As a matter of fact, I feel that is what the various liberation groups are all about. As wrongheaded as some of them are, they are still attempting to find new ways of solving problems. The way is being prepared for some kind of a change. We are confronted by terrifying dilemmas which, for their solution, demand a redefinition of ourselves. Redefinition will come about as the result of a renewal of transcendent belief." [Page 35]

INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT HAYDEN

"How then do you see America's future? Where is America going?"

"What can I say? I believe what the Bahá’í teachings tell us about the destiny of America. All I can do is have faith."

In reply to our request for further comment, he said, "From the Bahá’í writings we learn that America is to become the spiritual leader of the world. Now if I weren't a Bahá’í, I could hardly conceive of that, because things are so grim, there is so much corruption, there seems to be so little regard for spiritual values, and we have allowed irresponsible power-hungry men to lead us into a kind of labyrinth. Yet negative thoughts aside, one cannot help seeing the potential greatness of this country, once we are a united people. Throughout our history Americans have believed America has a purpose, a peculiar destiny, have believed in what we may call the new-world mystique. The Bahá’í Faith reinforces this idea but cautions us we are going to have to be purged of our weaknesses-our old-world sickness- before we can achieve our appointed task. Isn't America as much a spiritual idea as it is a physical entity or geographical unit?"

"You were mentioning the need for a change of heart and for adherence to spiritual ideals and so on," we said. "Are you referring to a sort of spiritual transcendence?"

"Yes, I am," he replied, adding, "How else shall we evolve except through commitment to transcendent values? It's not something which can be programmed, however; it's a matter of individual consciousness and conscience. Consider that in the past Americans have always been dissenters. Americans have never submitted for long to injustice. They have always gone to the defense of the underdog. Even in the days of slavery there were those people, like the Quakers, and there were the great men like Emerson and Thoreau, who laid it on the line and protested. Thoreau spent a night in jail rather than pay taxes to a slave-holding government. This is something which, during this Bicentennial period, we need to remember—that is, we have always been dissenters. There have always been among us people who have some vision of how things ought to be, and they have led the rest of us, the rest of the country, in the right direction. I think that this is true now. There are many voices warning us and exhorting us to live better and be better than we are. So this is something that has been true of America since its inception. If you think of the Indian situation, from the beginning there were those people who wanted to see the Indians treated right, who did not want to rob them and cheat them. It is too easy to generalize and say that America is a great vicious monster. This isn't true. Elements of the monster are certainly among us, but we have always had the people who have challenged tyranny and spoken for the truth."

"What would you identify as the destiny of America? What goal are we striving for, sensibly or insensibly?"

"I make the point in a piece I am writing that we don't really know ourselves, don't know what we are. We are so many different things, and beyond material [Page 36]

INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT HAYDEN

advancement we don't seem to know what it is we ought to be living for. There are exceptions to this, naturally. But I am straying from the question. To answer it directly, let me say that America seems destined to bring together all the people of the world. The country is already a kind of microcosm, and we are more and more international in outlook.

"Let me give you an example. I was recently in San Francisco, and one of the things that impressed me was that San Francisco, like New York, is a very international city. It is possible to meet people from all over the world in either one of those cities. Even though living conditions are certainly not ideal, and the mutual respect among people is not all it should be-despite all that, you have the sense that people live more or less in harmony and that they are interested in one another's culture. There is a kind of mingling of cultures. We stayed, for example, in a Japanese hotel. We didn't feel strange in that hotel, which was a combination of Western and Japanese. I get excited when I think about this because nationalism in any form is one of the evils of our times, and nationalism can only bring more and more antagonism and more and more suspicion amongst people. To come again more directly to the question: History, or events, seem to be pushing us toward internationalism, a world view. The Bahá’í teachings assure us that America will be an instrument for peace in the future. I think that maybe America is being prepared for that as a result of having all the races, cultures, and nationalities of the world in one way or another in the country."

Following this summary of his thoughts about the country's future we felt the need to know what place his vocation might have in such a future. "Does your art relate to America?" we asked.

"Well, I hope it does. My experiences as an American have obviously provided me with themes and determined how I look at life. I have never been a flag-waving patriot, but I profoundly believe in democracy, in the sacredness of the individual, in the dream of freedom for all. I am interested in American history, and I have written on historical themes. This does not mean that, as I have said, I do not find much to deplore, much to be angry about in our society. Thus I have written poems which lament or criticize aspects of America. I am not interested in any form of cultural nationalism, clearly. American life is a point of departure for me into an awareness of the universal.

"Looking at the relationship between my art and America from a very different perspective, I do find much in American life which is very exciting and much that is new and untried in the arts. There is great vitality and great energy here, and there is also material which has not yet been used, even by American writers and by American artists. I find all of this very exciting and very challenging."

"Do you feel that your poetry is American poetry?"

"Well, I don't know. A flip answer would be yes, because an American is writing it. Seriously, I have been thinking about this point, about what makes a poem American. I don't know whether American poets know. I once played around with" [Page 37]

INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT HAYDEN

a list of attributes for an American poem, and then I gave it up because I found that the list wasn't very good. Some poets have tried to write the American poem. Walt Whitman comes to mind first, for he saw himself as the bard of the American people. Hart Crane wrote about the Brooklyn Bridge, a very American theme. William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and others have explored native themes and idioms. But it is difficult, if not downright impossible, to define American poetry. Maybe, it's a matter of language, the rejection of 'literariness' in favor of the colloquial; maybe, a matter of outlook, social vision. The best American poets from Whitman on have very often eschewed the so-called poetic diction and tried to write a poetry that was very close to the English which Americans speak. American poets, I believe, are usually more harshly critical of their country than most other poets are permitted to be. Certainly this is one up for the United States. Though it may seem immodest on the poets' part, we can't help believing sometimes that we are the conscience of our people. I hope we never lose the freedom to write as we please-though we might. Some of my poems have been censored by textbook committees in the South. Which brings me back to a statement about my own work. Perhaps it is American poetry in that it often reflects my social consciousness, in that I feel free to write out of my own particular kind of awareness. But, to put it bluntly, I don't know what I'm talking about at this point!"

"What elements in America have been crucial to your artistic identity?"

"That's difficult to answer without being trite. I have to admit, though, that the racial situation has been strategic. It has both deterred and stultified me, and provided a kind of negative impetus. But that is not the only element. I have given a lot of thought to this, and I see that my struggles to be worthy as a poet and as a man, my own quest for my meaning as an individual have been crucial. Other artists would say much the same thing, for it is extremely difficult, not to say hazardous, to live as an artist in the United States. Poets are marginal people for the most part and always have been. Americans are a pragmatic people. We like to praise the pioneers and talk about the pioneer spirit, but the pioneers and the pioneer spirit had some very negative qualities too. They tended to be utilitarian. If you could eat it, wear it, or use it to build a fire with, it was good; if not, not. I think that every American artist has to struggle for his identity; he has somehow to survive in the midst of indifference and even downright antagonism. Now I'm not asking that there be no struggle. I think that some sort of struggle is necessary to the artist [Page 38]as it is to any human being, but there is a kind of puritanism in American life, a carryover from the past which distrusts the arts. As I said earlier, we tend to confuse art and entertainment, and we don't read poetry, for one thing. We have very little knowledge of poetry. There are many fine poets writing today, and the average well-educated person doesn't know who they are and doesn't really care. I won't go into the whys and wherefore of that, because that's a very long story. But I think that this creates certain problems for the poet, and I might say that I think the situation is better today than when I was a young person trying to be a poet. There seem to be more outlets and a little more interest than there was then.

"But I want to get back to the question. Crucial in my development has been the coming to grips with myself, my own soul, if you will, with my own realities as they have been revealed to me through my dedication to poetry and, yes, through religion. I have had to struggle to be a poet, and in some ways the struggle has been good for me. I am rather glad sometimes that it has been difficult, for it has given me a strength, a toughness of will, I might not have otherwise had. I have gained some sort of perspective that allows me the freedom to go my own way these days, despite the demands made upon my life and art by those who want me to 'submit to ideology,' political and racial."

"What elements of American poetry are universal and why?"

"I think that, with some exceptions, most of it seems to have a universal appeal. Russian poets and Latin American poets are heavily influenced by American poetry. So also are some of the poets in oriental countries, Japan, for example. There are some American poets whose work seems over specialized, geared to ethnic or political criteria; but, as I suggested in an article I wrote for World Order, many American poets today have a world view. There is considerable universality in American poetry, and, ironically, this is often criticized as undesirable by those who want nationalistic rhetoric, and so forth. In the past a great poet like Whitman, while he wanted to be the poet of the American people, hoped that everybody was going to read him and know his work. Of course, his hope was never realized; nevertheless, he was a cosmic poet, and we honor him today for his attempt. Many of us would hope that we too might achieve a degree of universality."

San Francisco continued to preoccupy Mr. Hayden's thoughts. At one point he asked whether we had noticed the various shapes and designs of the windows in San Francisco. Without any real need for an answer, he went on to describe what pleased him about those he had seen. We sensed the germination of a new poem, or so we thought.

6. See Robert Hayden, introduction, "Recent American Poetry-Portfolio II," World Order 9.4 (Summer 1975): 44-45. The portfolio of poems was the second (and last) that Hayden selected and introduced in World Order. [Page 39]

From Words in the Mourning Time

<poem> V Oh, what a world we make, oppressor and oppressed. Our world- this violent ghetto, slum of the spirit raging against itself. We hate kill destroy in the name of human good our killing and our hate destroy.

IX As the gook woman howls for her boy in the smouldering, as the expendable Clean-Cut Boys From Decent American Homes are slashing off enemy ears for keepsakes; as the victories are tallied up with flag-draped coffins, plastic bodybags, what can I say but this, this: 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.

-ROBERT HAYDEN </poem>

Reprinted from World Order 5.3 (Spring 1971): 42-43. Copyright 1971 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. [Page 40]

The Year of the Child

(for my Grandson)

And you have come, Michael Ahmán, to share your life with us. We have given you an archangel’s name― and a great poet’s; we honor too Abysinnian Ahmán, hero of peace. May these names be talismans; may they invoke divine magic to protect you, as we cannot, in a world that is no place for a child- that had no shelter for the children in Guyana slain by hands they trusted; no succor for the Biafran child with swollen belly and empty begging-bowl; no refuge for the child of the Warsaw ghetto. What we yearned but were powerless to do for them, oh we will dare, Michael, for you, knowing our need of unearned increments of grace. [Page 41]I look into your brilliant eyes, whose gaze renews, transforms each common thing, and hope that inner vision will intensify their seeing. I am content meanwhile to have you glance at me sometimes, as though, if you could talk, you'd let us in on a subtle joke. May Huck and Jim attend you. May you walk with beauty before you, beauty behind you, all around you and The Most Great Beauty keep you His concern. -ROBERT HAYDEN

Reprinted from World Order 13.4 (Summer 1979): 44-45. Copyright ©1980 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

[Page 43]

Reflections on a 1976 Interview with Robert Hayden

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

When the World Order Editorial Board decided to publish an issue honoring Robert Hayden on the thirtieth anniversary of his having been appointed Consultant in Poetry to the U.S. Library of Congress—the first African American to be so honored—it also decided to reprint an interview with him commissioned in 1976 as part of its issue marking the Bicentennial of the United States. For a contextualizing head note, the Board turned to Glenford E. Mitchell, the interviewer and, at the time, the magazine's managing editor.

Because of an imminent and very busy month-long vacation, he had to decline. But he took part of a Saturday afternoon in May 2006 to reread the 1976 interview while listening to a Duke Ellington compact disc. "Impulsively," he wrote, I "jotted down the thoughts that came to me just then—a reaction to what I had read, not an intended answer" to the Board's request. He went on to say that he transcribed his notes and sent them "in a spirit of sharing what occurred to me in an instant of spontaneous reflection."

The Editorial Board is sharing with its readers Mitchell's reminiscences. They open a window to the liveliness that Hayden brought to Board meetings and the contributions he made to the Board's deliberations. But, more important, they provide a glimpse into the complexity of the mind of one of America's foremost poets of the twentieth century.

-THE EDITORS

Copyright 2006 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

1. See the interview on pages 29-38.

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL a member since 1982 of the Universal House of Justice, the international governing body of the Bahá’í Faith, holds a Master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. He was Assistant Editor for Africa Report for four years and taught English composition and journalism at Howard University and Indiana State University in Terre Haute. World Order's managing editor from 1967 to 1982, he was a member of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States from 1968 to 1982, serving as its Secretary-General for fourteen years. [Page 44]

AFTERWORD

At the time of the interview in 1976 Robert Hayden and I had known each other for nine years. We met for the first time in the summer of 1967 at Indiana State University in Terre Haute where we were members of the teaching staff of a summer program called Upward Bound, which was designed to aid a number of socially deprived youth to become achievers. Our encounters then and until I left America in 1982 to serve the Bahá’í Faith at its World Center in Haifa, Israel, were brief, except for the meetings of the World Order Editorial Board with which we were connected—I as managing editor, and he as poetry editor. These occasions took place in New Haven, Connecticut, at the home of Firuz Kazemzadeh, then the Master of Davenport College at Yale University. Where memory fails me, pleasant impressions remain of the intellectual exercises through which we went in identifying themes and topics for future issues of the magazine, no less than of the cheerful hospitality we were accorded.

Hayden's participation in the discussions was wholehearted. He drew on a seemingly endless store of tales out of a rich and variegated personal experience as a colored, a Negro, a black, an Afro-American and a profound knowledge of the literature, history, and folklore of America. His manner of laughing lent a distinctive flavor to the humor that punctuated our conversations; one would see him relax and the shyness generally characteristic of him dissolve in the camaraderie induced by the unity of purpose that illumined our gatherings. The man was clearly a serious thinker, constantly preoccupied, it seemed, with some idea, presumably the germ of a poem in the making. Sometimes he would tell us about something on which he was working. The Editorial Board benefitted greatly from his service.

For all the times spent in his company, I never felt that I really knew him. Our closest encounters outside of the Editorial Board meetings as I remember were two: One was the occasion on which he came to dinner in my home at the very time that a night-blooming cereus had yielded a glorious fruition—a moment that had much symbolism for me because the coincidence of his visit and this botanical event evoked thoughts of his poem known by the name of that flower. The other was the interview I conducted with him for the special edition of World Order in observance of the Bicentennial of the United States. It took place on an afternoon in his room at the Orrington Hotel in Evanston, Illinois. What I remember most from the experience, apart from the great sense of privilege I felt at being allowed to explore his thoughts briefly, are his cheerful courtesy and the distinctive aroma that issued from the smoke of his ever-present pipe.

As the interview indicated, Robert Hayden was an African American who was first and foremost a person unbounded by labels, ethnic or otherwise. Being an African American was not a precise point of identity for him. It was simply an element of the diversity that his being contributed to the human world beyond the popularly presumed boundary of race. It was, nonetheless, an important prism through which to see the human family and from which he attempted to engage, through his poetry, its widely extended members in contemplating values and issues of spiritual and social significance to them all. This transcendence, he clearly believed, was [Page 45]

AFTERWORD

a normal aspiration for any person wishing to effect progress in a society inhibited from realizing its potentialities in a world circumscribed by racial labels and the stultification they implied for those who lived by them.

Hayden's temperament made him wary of labels of any kind; he was not ready to be a "joiner," as he said in the interview. If, however, he considered himself a part of the Bahá’í community, it might be that he felt himself at home in a world that was not constricted ethnically, intellectually, or aesthetically—or that held such a promise. In this regard, his poem "And all the atoms cry aloud" admits us into an awareness of the prospect he perceived of a pathway toward the universal horizon that inspired his voice as it beckoned his spirit. [Page 46]And all the atoms cry aloud I bear Him witness now. Who by the light of suns beyond the suns beyond the sun with shrill pen Revealed renewal of the covenant of timelessness with time, proclaimed advent of splendor Ecstasy alone can comprehend and the imperious evils of an age could not withstand And stars and stones and seas acclaimed His life, His words its crystal image and magnetic field. I bear Him witness now- mystery Whose major clues are the heart of man, the mystery of God: [Page 47]

Bahá’u’lláh

logos, cosmic poet, cosmic architect of unity and peace, Wronged, exiled One, chosen to endure what agonies of knowledge, what dazzling, dread Bestowals of truth, of vision, power, heartbreak for our future's sake. "O King! I was but a man "Like others, asleep upon My couch, when lo, the breezes of the All-Glorious were wafted over Me...." Called, as in dead of dark a dreamer is roused to help the helpless flee a burning house. I bear Him witness now: toward Him all history moves, toward Him our history in its disastrous rage for order is impelled. -ROBERT HAYDEN

Reprinted from World Order 21.1-2 (Fall 1986/Winter 1986-87): 50-51 (Copyright © 1989 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States) and from World Order 2.2 (Winter 1967): 8-9 (Copyright 1968 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States). [Page 48]

Dawnbreaker

Ablaze with candles sconced in weeping eyes of wounds, He danced through jeering streets to death; oh sang against The drumming mockery God's praise. Flames nested in his flesh Fed the fires that consume us now, the fire that will save.

-ROBERT HAYDEN

Reprinted from World Order 1.2 (Winter 1966): 19. Copyright 1966 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. The poem is from Robert Hayden's Selected Poems and is reprinted by permission of October House. [Page 49]

A SPECIAL ISSUE ON UNDERSTANDING MATERIALISM

ABSTRACT DEADLINE: AUGUST 15, 2006

Religious people throughout the ages have often been critical of "materialism." But what exactly is materialism? The term connotes several distinct concepts, at least some of which have no direct relation to one another. The term not only means different things in different fields of inquiry but has also meant different things in different historical periods. If one is to think critically and intelligently about "materialism," one must be clear about the various meanings of the term. World Order is seeking submissions that survey critically the distinct concepts to which the term materialism refers, in such diverse fields as philosophy; theology; the social sciences, including history and economics; psychology; and Bahá’í studies. We invite, in particular, treatments of "materialism" in the following contexts:

Brief Critical Reviews

Materialism as ontology, traditionally the view that only entities that exist are physical entities. What is the case for and against this view of the nature of reality? What is the history of this idea? What is its current status in philosophy?

Materialism as philosophy of mind, the view that the mind is a purely physical phenomenon. What is the case for and against this view of the mind? What is the history of this idea? What, if any, are its ethical implications? What is its current status in philosophy of mind and psychology?

Materialism as historical methodology, the view that economic factors, rather than ideas, are the most important causes of historical outcomes. What is the case for and against historical materialism? What is its current status in the social sciences?

Extended Essays

Materialism as consumerist ethic, the view that the consumption of material goods is the most important component of a flourishing human life. What is the philosophical case for and against a consumerist ethic? What are the social, economic, political, spiritual, and ecological consequences of consumerism? How widespread are consumerist values and culture? What are the causes of consumerist values and culture? What are the causes and consequences of what social scientists call "post-material" values? What is the relationship between globalization and consumerism? Between capitalism and consumerism? What is the future of consumerism? Can it be contained? What role should material goods play in a human life?

Materialism as scientific explanation, the epistemological view that the only appropriate methods of scientific explanation and justification appeal to material phenomena only. What is the case for this view of science? What is the history of this idea? What is its current status among philosophers? Among scientists? Is this view of scientific explanation compatible with religion? With theism? With the Bahá’í writings? How is it different from other senses of materialism?

Materialism in the Bahá’í writings. What did ‘Abdu’l-Bahá mean by the term materialism? What does analysis of the original Persian- and Arabic-language texts of the Bahá’í writings tell us about what is meant by materialism? What did materialism mean in the nineteenth century, and how does this help us understand what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá meant by it when addressing nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophers and audiences? What did Shoghi Effendi mean by materialism? What do the Bahá’í writings say about materialism in its various senses? In what sense(s) and for what reasons are the Bahá’í writings critical of materialism?

Manuscript Submission Information

For a copy of the World Order style sheet for preparing a manuscript (and other tips), send an e-mail to <worldorder@usbnc.org>, or write the address below.

Submissions to the journal will be subject to external blind peer review if they fall outside the expertise of the Editorial Board or upon request by the author.

Manuscripts (in Word or WordPerfect) should be sent to World Order, Dr. Betty J. Fisher, Managing Editor, 7311 Quail Springs Place NE, Albuquerque, NM 87113-1780, USA or to <worldorder@usbnc.org>.

World Order has been published quarterly since 1966 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. [Page 50]

Forthcoming...

Alexandra Humphrey reviews Building Sustainable Peace, edited by Tom Keating and W. Andy Knight

Firuz Kazemzadeh reviews Kenneth E. Bowers’ God Speaks Again

Anne Gordon Perry reviews The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, 1904–05, edited by David Wells and Sandra Wilson

Robert H. Stockman reviews In Service to the Common Good: The American Bahá’í Community’s Commitment to Social Change