Arts and Letters

When he died at Ann Arbor on February 25th, Robert Hayden had been a member of the Institute for less than a year, but he had been recognized by one of our highest honors, the Loines Award, ten years earlier. I remember meeting him for the first time, in the room just above this one, when he came to receive that prize. The thick-lensed glasses, which were the badge of the near-blindness he lived with all his adult life, were what I identified him by, though then as now, minority members are not hard to identify in our number. He was a man of great dignity, and accepted the many honors of his late years modestly, as he had accepted neglect most of his years philosophically. These honors were to include the Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal in 1976, the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Consultancy in Poetry of the Library of Congress, and an honorary degree from Brown University. These honors, coming after years of writing and service to literature—he taught at Fisk University for twenty-two years, and in recent years at the University of Michigan—gratified but did not perceptibly change him from the gentle, powerful, original, and solitary genius he had always been.

He was born in 1913 in a section of Detroit called Paradise Valley—the name for the slum area was perhaps among his first insights into the rough poetry of Black America: in any case he invoked it in the title of one of the finest poems in American Journal in 1978. He studied at Wayne University, and at the University of Michigan with Wystan Auden.

He published his first book of poetry in 1940. His works included A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), Selected Poems (1966), Words in the Mourning Time (1970), The Night-Blooming Cereus (1972), Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems (1975), and American Journal (1978). Earlier this year, he was one of the poets who read his poems at the White House. We must all regret that his poems will be read among us this evening for the first time by other voices than his.

In the ’6os Robert Hayden declared himself, at considerable cost, an American poet rather than a Black poet, when for a time there was posited an irreconcilable difference. There is scarcely a line of his which is not identifiable as an experience of Black America, but he would not relinquish the title of American artist for any narrower identity.

When he was in Providence in 1976 to receive an honorary degree he told of an experience at the University of Michigan when he first went there to teach. A young black man came to his office one day, not on literary business but to reproach him for his dress. "How can you, a black man, come to your office day after day wearing a suit like that, the uniform of your white oppressor?" Hayden was elegantly dressed that morning in Providence, when he told the story. "I've always liked to dress myself up a little," he said then, "and I told this boy, 'I'm just coming into my style, boy. You ain't seen nothing yet.’"

It was his work to share and to enlighten American black experience, not to diminish it by rancor. This he did by the simple method of almost flawless art, art which finally called so loud across the muffling chasm of color that, at last, he was heard. We can be proud that the Institute had a part in recognizing his vision. It is a complex vision of mutual responsibility, maintained optimistically, as he maintained his Ba'hai faith and his high personal code. I want to let this rich, committed, provisional optimism speak for itself, and therefore I finish with a poem, his "The Whipping.''

The old woman across the way
is whipping the boy again
and shouting to the neighborhood
her goodness and his wrongs.

Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,
pleads in dusty zinnias, while she in spite of crippling fat
pursues and corners him.

She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling
boy till the stick breaks
in her hand. His tears are rainy weather
to woundlike memories:

My head gripped in bony vise
of knees, the writhing struggle
to wrench free, the blows, the fear
worse than blows that hateful

Words could bring, the face that I
no longer knew or loved…
Well, it is over now, it is over,
and the boy sobs in his room,

And the woman leans muttering against
a tree, exhausted, purged—
avenged in part for lifelong hidings
she has had to bear.