Forty years after the publication of his celebrated book, Selected Poems, in 1966, Detroit-born Black American poet Robert Hayden is still being defined according to the narrow margins of race which he resented and resisted throughout his literary career.
During an NPR interview not long ago, former United States poet laureate Billy Collins set off a firestorm when he said that “[Hayden] was not terribly popular with the African American community, you might say, in that he didn’t tend to write about subjects that were racial. You really can’t tell from many of his poems what his race is.”
Collins’s statements are stunningly misleading. His remark reveals a racial bias that believes that Black poets have limited imaginations and only write about racial themes. His remark is a reminder of the old guard thinking among literary elites that believed “Negro poets” were second class and that the work of “Negro poets” was less sophisticated than white poets’ work. Inherent in Collins’s remark is that Hayden had broken from racial stereotype in his poetry and ventured into subjects that one would expect of white poets only.
It is this type of thinking that shackled Black artists to second class status for much of the last century. It is a bias that still seeks to fetter Hayden’s legacy in the 21st century.
Collins’s remark is ironic too because, although he is not a very well-known poet, Robert Hayden’s poems on Black historical themes are widely published. Any one reading a modern American anthology is more likely to be introduced to one of Hayden’s Black history poems than to any other.
Hayden intentionally explored racial themes in his poetry in order to try to understand the capacity for evil in human nature and to make sense of a cultural legacy of enslavement and prejudice. Some of his most popular poems along this line are “O Daedalus, Fly Away Home,” “El Hajj Malik El Shabazz,” “Frederick Douglass,” and “Middle Passage.”
His poem, “Runagate, Runagate,” a term for a plantation runaway, vividly recreates the frantic pace, terror and determination of a Black person in escape from the hardship of slavery:
Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness
and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror
and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing
and the night cold and the night long and the river
to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning
and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere
morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on going
from “Runagate Runagate” by Robert Hayden
Hayden is one of the most skilled American poets that give voice to Black American cultural values such as freedom, self-determination and spiritual renewal. Yet, Hayden resisted being straitjacketed by racial bias, such as Collins’s statement, “you really can’t tell from many of his poems what his race is.”
During his career as a poet, which spanned from about 1940 to his death in 1980, Hayden resisted stereotyping by making clear that he preferred to be known as an American poet rather than a Black poet. His stance, however, should not call into question his legitimacy as one of the most gifted interpreters of Black American experience.
“Mean mean mean to be free” is a repeated phrase in “Runagate, Runagate” that well applies to Hayden’s own legacy. Hayden meant to be free as an artist, unfettered by racial stereotype. It remains the responsibility of those who know his accomplishments to present an accurate appraisal of Robert Hayden’s work and contributions to the canon of American literature. Uphold the determined spirit of our ancestors to “mean mean mean to be free” from all forms of enduring racial bias.
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