Answering "The Waste Land": Robert Hayden and the Rise of the African American Poetic Sequence

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Brian Conniff

April of 1966 was one of the most eventful and paradoxical months in the history of twentieth-century American poetry. At the Third World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, Robert Hayden's A Ballad of Remembrance was awarded "the Grand Prix" as "the best" recent volume of Anglophone poetry (qtd. by Pool 43). In at least some international literary circles, the prestige of this award roughly matched its Olympic title. The first such event to be held on "independent African soil," the Festival was sponsored by Leopold Sedar Senghor in conjunction with UNESCO and the Societe Africaine de Culture and was attended by over 10,000 people from thirty-seven nations (Vaillant 323).(1) The other finalists in the poetry competition were Derek Walcott's In a Green Night and Christopher Okigbo's Limits. Langston Hughes was one of the judges. Also in attendance were Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, Alioune Diop, Yevgeny Yevtoshenko, and Duke Ellington. Andre Malraux, then French Minister of Culture, seems to have captured the prevailing spirit when he praised the Festival as an indication that Senghor's cultural program was about to shape "the destiny of a continent" (qtd. by Vaillant 323).

For Hayden, though, the Grand Prix was wildly unexpected. He had not yet published a book with a commercial or university press in the United States, and he was still teaching fifteen hours each semester as an associate professor in the English department at Fisk University. Even the Grand Prix itself, when it first arrived, seemed to do him as much harm as good.(2)

In fact, within a few days, while his poetry was being praised in Senegal as the centerpiece of international negritude, back home in Nashville Hayden was being attacked as the scapegoat of choice for a new generation of African American poets.(3) At Fisk's First Black Writers' Conference, a group of writers and students, led by Melvin Tolson, assailed Hayden as the stooge of exploitive capitalists and, all in all, a traitor to his race. For the most part, Tolson and his supporters endorsed the "Black Cultural Nationalism" of Ron Karenga, with its declarations that "all art must reflect and support the Black Revolution" and that "any art that does not discuss and contribute to the revolution is invalid" (33). Hayden's crime was that he refused to be labeled a "Negro poet." From the beginning of the conference, and much to the dismay of most of his audience, he insisted that he should be considered, instead, "a poet who happens to be Negro" (Llorens 60).(4) When he reiterated his position at a panel discussion - which also included Tolson, Ama Bontemps, and Margaret Walker - the advocates of Black Cultural Nationalism reacted as though they had come face to face with the Enemy. Tolson's response was perhaps most characteristic. Among other things, he declared that, "when a man writes, he tells me which way he went in society." "I'm a black poet," he continued, "an African-American poet, a Negro poet. I'm no accident - and I don't give a tinker's damn what you think" (qtd. in Llorens 62-63).(5) One member of the audience even accused Hayden of contributing to the "delusion" of the "young black people" studying at Fisk (64). In the following months, students on the Fisk campus - almost all of whom, as Hayden was well aware, were from backgrounds more privileged than his own - continued to refer to him as an "Uncle Tom" or an "Oreo," believing that he should use the prestige granted by the Grand Prix to authorize and advance their political positions (Hatcher 38).

I begin with these events for three reasons. First of all, it is in these few days that studies of Hayden almost inevitably find their critical center - and, unfortunately, Hayden's defining moment.(6) From a conventionally biographical perspective, this focus might seem reasonable. In the years immediately following the Third World Festival of Negro Arts, Hayden was granted a brief flurry of academic and otherwise official interest. From 1967 to 1969, he was offered a couple of visiting professorships, a permanent position at the University of Louisville, a recording at the Library of Congress, and finally the position at the University of Michigan that he would accept and then occupy for the rest of his life (Williams 32). Nonetheless, it is safe to say that by the end of the 1960s, soon after the Grand Prix and his auspicious association with the negritude movement, and at least until very recently, Hayden would regain and retain his status as "one of the most underrated and unrecognized poets in America" (Lester 4).(7) This neglect is largely the result of a collective choice - usually implicit but nonetheless clear - that academic critics have made in their descriptions of Hayden's career. Hayden's poetry has rarely been considered in terms of its rich affiliations with the work of major international poets - including Walcott, Okigbo, and Cesaire, among many others - as suggested at the Third World Festival. And his poetry has never been seriously considered - at least by mainstream critics - in relation to the major works by younger African American poets who have found it a rich resource and an inspiration.(8) Rather, his poetry has been viewed - by his detractors and most of his supporters - as somehow determined by his one-line answer to the "Negro question," as it was framed by his opponents at the Fisk Conference. For Tolson and the younger writers of the emerging Black Arts Movement, Hayden eventually came to be viewed as a poet of some ability - and some minor historical significance - whose work is irreparably limited and dated because, in their view, it was not sufficiently concerned with issues of race. Even Arna Bontemps, who was often sympathetic with Hayden's work, would conclude after the Fisk Conference that Hayden "doesn't really like that Negro thing" (qtd. in Llorens 61). For a handful of more conservative critics and editors, Hayden's poetry has also maintained a kind of marginal interest - and, ironically, for much the same reason. For instance, in the influential Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair begin their introduction to Hayden's poetry by stating that Hayden "did not subscribe to any esthetic of Black poetry." They describe his poetry in terms of his interest in the work of Countee Cullen, Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and "the English classics" (863), and then include a selection of Hayden's poetry that would seem to suggest, to a reader unfamiliar with his career, that he must have been trying to write a kind of race-free poetry. In either case, Hayden's critical reception has served, more than anything, to obscure and diminish his most formidable accomplishments.