Robert Hayden (1913-1980). Biography and Creativity

Born August 4, 1913, Robert Hayden died on February 25, 1980, the day after an event celebrating his life and work at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he had studied years before and had been most recently employed. While he had been too ill to attend, a group of old friends and former students caravanned to his home, where he briefly regaled them with his stories and his humor.

The next morning he was dead. Hayden was a poet both vilified and honored, for more or less the same qualities. His work at its best has been described as readily accessible from the surface yet deeply complex as it is probed. His life was full of contradictions. He discovered late in his life that the name he had used throughout it had not been his own. And though he seems to have been greatly loved by his parents, both his birth parents and adopted ones struggled for his affections in ways that left him scarred and insecure. In his life as an artist, he also struggled first to find his voice, to make space for creating his poetry, and then to use his poet’s voice according to his own internal lights regardless of the pressures around him. His was a life marked by struggle and conflict yet filled with achievement and grace.

Born Asa Bundy Sheffey, he knew himself as Robert Earl Hayden. After Ruth and Asa Sheffey separated, William and Sue Ellen Hayden of Detroit raised him from the time he was around 18 months old. The confusion about his actual name reveals the type of unresolved tension that surrounded his early life. When he was in his 40s, his mother told him that his adoption by the Haydens had never been formal, so that his given name remained Asa Sheffey. Even though he was then an adult, this revelation shook Hayden deeply. Yet, as the poem he wrote in response to that revelation, “Names,” reveals, these very tensions and contradictions became a rich source for his art.

From the beginning of his life, these tensions were manifest; his childhood, for example, was sometimes quite difficult. His family struggled at the brink of poverty “so harshened after each unrelenting day / that they were shouting-angry” (“Summertime and the Living . . .”). The Paradise Valley neighborhood he lived in was a ghetto that pulsed with the ugliness and variety of life, mostly unadorned. In several poems, most notably in “Elegies for Paradise Valley,” he examines the characters and life he encountered there, from a dead “junkie in maggots” that he could see from his bedroom window to the “Godfearing elders, even Godless grifters [who] tried as best they could to shelter [the children] there.”

And still this place was full of richness and disregarded beauty like the sunflowers and the children. Added to the burden of the poverty surrounding him was Hayden’s extremely poor eyesight. Until his death, he required thick “Coke-bottle” glasses. Because he was so nearsighted, he was never drawn to the kinds of sports and physical activities expected of boys, and he felt that both the fathers in his life were disappointed in him. Yet this was also a mixed blessing. Lacking sports skills, living in the midst of harsh surroundings, and knowing an often-tense family life, Hayden retreated into books.

William Hayden (“Pa Hayden”) was a laborer and a staunch fundamentalist Christian, a longtime member in good standing of the Second Baptist Church to which Hayden himself would belong while he was a member of that household. Pa Hayden forbade playing jazz and blues that Robert and Sue Hayden loved, on religious principle. And although he seems to have wished that his son would have spent a little less time in books, he always wanted Robert to “get something in his head” and did all he could to support Robert’s efforts to get an education. Some of William Hayden’s complexities are immortalized in one of Hayden’s most frequently anthologized works, “Those Winter Sundays,” in which Hayden reflects on his own limited understanding as a child:

What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
(“Those Winter Sundays” ll. 13-14)

His relationship with his mothers was likewise complicated and fruitful. Rose Sheffey, his birth mother, introduced him to the arts and to a creative world beyond the poor streets of Paradise Valley, the Detroit neighborhood where he grew up. Even though her continued presence in his life caused tension, she also seemed to understand him best, helping him get music lessons initially and taking him to shows and entertainments when he visited her in Buffalo, New York. His adopted mother, Sue Ellen Hayden, had her own set of conflicts with her husband (William was her second husband), and she was also struggling with pressures that Hayden as a child did not understand. Yet turning his adult eye toward their conflicts, he produced another significant poem, “The Whipping.”

And in “The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westfield,” he provides insight into human motivation, the understanding he gleaned as an adult who had processed his childhood and transformed it into art, imagining a perspective lost on him as a child. He also credits her with introducing him to African-American history through the stories of her own previous life in the South and through family stories as well as through characters from folktales.

This early introduction was the platform from which he launched into his studies of African-American history in earnest during his days working for the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) (1936-40). Throughout his career some of the most memorable poems he created were based on his continued exploration of African-American figures and history: “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” and “Runagate, Runagate,” to name only three.

As a black poet in the 1930s and as a child of a Detroit slum, Hayden aspired to leave the world of his youth and was blessed with a strong mind, a facile imagination, and good fortune. Hayden encountered minor miracles throughout his life. Being hired in 1936 by the Federal Writers’ Project was one. But as early as his elementary school years, Hayden’s passion for words drew attention and help. For example, he was lucky in the notice a public librarian took of the nearsighted boy who was so interested in books.

According to Hayden, she would save books of poetry for him, and as he began writing himself, publishing in the local church and community newsletters and such, she would display his work. Added to that encouragement, a social worker observing his carrying books of poetry (one by Countee Cullen) as he stood in line for assistance talked to him about them. He told her that one day he would write a book. A few days later she showed up with information about a contact that might help him get into college. He made the contact and thus attended Detroit City College (now Wayne State).

Throughout Hayden’s life, in fact, it seems that these “angels” appeared at critical junctures, unbidden. His first book Heart-shape in the Dust (1940) was published in a similar way. Another important intervention in his life occurred when he became a Ba’hai in the 1940s (for more information on this religion, consult www.bahai.org). His commitment to the precepts of his faith defined his worldview. Hayden also achieved one of his greatest honors— winning the Grand Prix de la Poesie at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966—through a kind of intervention. He had not himself submitted his work for consideration. Rosey Poole, a scholar of African-American poetry residing in Great Britain, had been aware of his work and called it to the attention of a friend and colleague, Paul Breman, who published A Ballad of Remembrance in 1962. Dr. Poole intervened again when she realized that this work was not in the preliminary list. With help from Langston Hughes (another committee member), Hayden’s work was included.

Yet each of these miracles, as it were, was accompanied by strife and difficulty. Although a librarian helped and encouraged him, he had to transfer to a special school for his early high school career because of his worsening eyesight. Yet in his senior year, he transferred again and ended his high school career with a poem in the school arts publication. His year of graduation, however, was 1930, the beginning of the Great Depression. There was no money for him to attend college, so he worked at whatever he could during the day and took night classes with William Hayden’s permission.

That preceded his attendance at Detroit College. The most dramatic contrast occurred in 1966, however. In the same year that he won the Grand Prix, he was publicly attacked as an “Uncle Tom” and “accommodationist” at the First Black Writers Conference held at Fisk University, where he had been teaching and nurturing aspiring writers for over 20 years. Black artists asserting the necessity of using the arts as a platform for furthering the cause of social justice were exasperated by Hayden’s refusal to subordinate craft, from his point of view, to politics. But this attack—public and led by some colleagues and students—was as traumatic for him as winning the Grand Prix was exhilarating.

In the last decade of his life, however, his efforts and achievements seem to have coalesced. He published three books of poetry in the 1970s—Words in the Mourning Time (1970), The Night-Blooming Cereus (1972), and American Journal (1978). He was also elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Poets in 1975, finally appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1976-77—the first African American to be appointed to that position—and reappointed in 1977-78. Hayden also became a full professor at the University of Michigan and received several honorary doctorates, among them one at Brown University.

Yet his health began to fail toward the latter half of the decade. Diagnosed with cancer by 1978, he had begun “to get his papers in order,” though he was still accepting speaking engagements and hard at work on new poems. The University of Michigan and the Ba’hai community of Ann Arbor collaborated to honor him at “A Tribute to Robert Hayden,” the event he missed because of a bout of influenza. Still, what people remembered on hearing of his death the following day were the wit and charm with which he entertained his guests the evening before.

Hayden’s was a life distinguished by his devotion to art, specifically to poetry. By some standards his output is quite small—often the new poems in a volume numbered as few as 12 or 13. He published three volumes he later considered to be his “apprentice works,” Heart-shape in the Dust, The Lion and the Archer, and Figure in Time. And though he continued publishing, mostly overseas, he took 27 years to place his work with a major American publisher.

Throughout that time, however, his notebooks, papers, and, indeed, prior published versions of his work show the meticulousness he lavished on crafting his poetry. There are many revisions, sometimes quite subtle and other times more extensive. His biographers provide an index and insight into these changes. In the end, however, it is this dedication to craftsmanship that marks his work as distinctive and that rewards the careful reader’s full attention.