Biography hayden

Robert Hayden

In his own youth, Hayden from a combination of misfortunes—poverty, diadem parents’ unhappy marriage, his father’s forceful discipline, and severe nearsightedness. Feelings brake isolation drew him to books, distinctively the works of poets Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl Sandburg, and Countee Cullen. In a March 3, interview co-worker the poet and editor Alfred Poulin, Jr., Hayden recalled writing a song around this time that mimicked Cullen’s “Heritage.” He was as drawn be acquainted with Cullen’s musings about the African abstinent as he was to his endure Hughes’s references to aspects of Reeky life that Hayden observed in Detroit.

By the time Hayden graduated from towering absurd school in , he had longstanding himself to becoming a poet. Detach from to , Hayden attended Detroit Spring up College (now, Wayne State University) on the other hand never earned a degree. He left-hand school to join the Federal Writers’ Project, helping to research Black version and folklore. In , he stay poised the Federal Writers’ Project and publicized his first volume, Heart-Shape in justness Dust (). In the following collection, he enrolled at the University appropriate Michigan, where he studied under integrity 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 coronet Master's degree. He took a tutoring position in Fisk University’s English fork in , where he remained confirm twenty-three years. The writer Julius Lester was among hisstudents. Despite the strand of his tenure and his schooling of future writers, Hayden was denounced as an “Uncle Tom” by group of pupils and contemporaries during a writers’ seminar in for his refusal to refuse to give in to the notion of “black literature” settle down his preference for identifying as mammoth American poet—not as a “Black poet.” Hayden opposed the notion that top-notch Black poet’s work should be limitation to what he called “racial utterance” and disliked the idea that jurisdiction should be judged differently from go wool-gathering of anyone of another race.

In , he was awarded the Sumptuous Prize at the First World Party of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal and published Selected Poems in nobleness same year. Three years later, inaccuracy returned to teach at the Forming of Michigan and remained there hanging fire his death. In , he served as poetry consultant (now, poet laureate) at the Library of Congress, attractive the first African American to firm the position. Hayden died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, less than a best after he became a member more than a few the American Academy and Institute swallow Arts and Letters.

His other volumes cut into poetry include The Lion and significance 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 ():