Robert Earl Hayden (August 4th 1913 to February 25th 1980) belonged to the generation of African American writers that followed the Harlem Renaissance--the generation of Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright, among others.

Hayden was the first African-American to be appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now titled the U.S. Poet Laureate. He won numerous prizes and awards during the last decade of his life, including the 1975 Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for "distinguished poetic achievement." Hayden stands out among Twentieth Century American, poets not just for his many literary accomplishments, but for the strong vision of faith that illuminates so much of his work.

 

 

Collected Poems
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Paperback: 205 pages
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation (February 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0871401592
ISBN-13: 978-0871401595
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches

This collection includes the poem "Those Winter Sundays" read, by Carl Hancock Rux, in the above video

 

American Journal: Poems
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Paperback: 72 pages
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation (January 1, 1982)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0871401274
ISBN-13: 978-0871401274
Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.3 inches

 

 

Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems
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Paperback: 144 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.; 1st Paper, 1st Printing edition (November 17, 1975)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0871401061
ISBN-13: 978-0871401069
Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches

Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry
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Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: University of Michigan Press (October 23, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0472112333
ISBN-13: 978-0472112333
Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches

by Laurence Goldstein (Editor), Robert Chrisman (Edito

This collection of essays on Hayden by leading critics and poets charts his growing reputation as a major writer, the author of some of the twentieth century's most important poems on African American themes, including the famed "Middle Passage" and "Frederick Douglass." The pieces illuminate the themes and techniques that established Hayden as a key modernist writer with affinities both to poets such as T. S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca, and W. B. Yeats, and to traditions of African American writings, traditions exemplified by such figures as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.

Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry covers sixty years of commentary, book reviews, and essays, and includes newly published material by Hayden himself, making it an invaluable contribution to our understanding of this poet's vision of experience, artistry, and influence. Forty works examine the life and poetry of the first African American to serve as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the post now called Poet Laureate) and the first to receive the Grand Prix de la Poesie at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar, Senegal, in 1966. This collection will be the standard text on Hayden for many years and will provide an invaluable aid to students, scholars, and the poet's growing number of admirers around the world.

Hayden's Poem: Frederick Douglass

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

 

Related Links

Robert hayden at Poets.org
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/196