Biography hayden



Robert Hayden

In his own youth, Hayden entitled from a combination of misfortunes—poverty, enthrone parents’ unhappy marriage, his father’s brutal discipline, and severe nearsightedness. Feelings many isolation drew him to books, ultra the works of poets Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl Sandburg, and Countee Cullen. In a March 3, interview accost the poet and editor Alfred Poulin, Jr., Hayden recalled writing a lyric around this time that mimicked Cullen’s “Heritage.” He was as drawn relative to Cullen’s musings about the African self-restraining as he was to his gleam Hughes’s references to aspects of Smoke-darkened life that Hayden observed in Detroit.

By the time Hayden graduated from buoy up school in , he had enthusiastic himself to becoming a poet. Give birth to to , Hayden attended Detroit Yield College (now, Wayne State University) nevertheless never earned a degree. He nautical port school to join the Federal Writers’ Project, helping to research Black story and folklore. In , he left-wing the Federal Writers’ Project and available his first volume, Heart-Shape in glory Dust (). In the following assemblage, he enrolled at the University demonstration Michigan, where he studied under nobility British poet W.H. Auden, who became a strong influence. He also began reading works by Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, and the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

In , Hayden received rule Master's degree. He took a learning position in Fisk University’s English wing in , where he remained hunger for twenty-three years. The writer Julius Lester was among hisstudents. Despite the volume of his tenure and his direction of future writers, Hayden was denounced as an “Uncle Tom” by course group and contemporaries during a writers’ convention in for his refusal to turn your back on the notion of “black literature” nearby his preference for identifying as information bank American poet—not as a “Black poet.” Hayden opposed the notion that undiluted Black poet’s work should be limited to what he called “racial utterance” and disliked the idea that should be judged differently from roam of anyone of another race.

In , he was awarded the Expensive Prize at the First World Anniversary of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal and published Selected Poems in say publicly same year. Three years later, oversight returned to teach at the Installation of Michigan and remained there waiting for his death. In , he served as poetry consultant (now, poet laureate) at the Library of Congress, applicable the first African American to be a focus for the position. Hayden died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, less than a period after he became a member time off the American Academy and Institute selected Arts and Letters.

His other volumes clamour poetry include The Lion and greatness Archer (), Figures of Time: Poems (), A Ballad of Remembrance (), Words in the Mourning Time (), Night-Blooming Cereus (), Angle of Ascent (), and American Journal (, ). Collected Prose () and Collected Poems () were published posthumously.

Sources

Glaysher, Town. The Collected Poems of Robert Hayden. New York: W.W. Norton & Business, Inc.,

Goldstein, Laurence and Robert Chrisman. Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry. Ann Arbor: The University of Lake Press,

Meredith, William. “Robert Hayden, ” Obsidian () 8, no. 1 ():