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

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Brian Conniff

For those of us who have entered the academy well after the rise of postmodern theory, I think it is difficult to appreciate just how common, and at times overwhelming, the monumentalizing view of Eliot was in the 1940s. Overcoming "The Waste Land" was a problem Hayden shared with such different poets as H.D. when she wrote her Trilogy, William Carlos Williams when he wrote the first four books of Paterson, and even Charles Olson, early in the next decade, when he began The Maxim us Poems. As these poets progressed through the 1940s and 1950s, they were not worried, as their predecessors had been, that tradition, as they knew it, was about to end, and that therefore there might no longer be anything of significance to write; rather, they were driven, and at times practically inebriated, by a sense of freedom they associated with the end of tradition, in the conventional academic sense of the term. That is why, just when literary criticism was being established in an unprecedented state of institutional security and influence within the academy, and mainstream critics were settling on a totalizing view of poetic tradition, a number of American poets were undertaking some of the most ambitiously experimental work of the century.

That is also the reason that, no matter how monumental high modernist poetics might have seemed to be when Hayden began his career, his confrontation with "The Waste Land" should not be construed as the kind of agonistic struggle against "belatedness" imagined by Harold Bloom in books like The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, and Agon. Hayden's revision of Eliot's poetics was far more conscious and strategic than Bloom's Freudian mythology would allow, and more engaged with history than Bloom's metaphysics and his preoccupation with private irony have ever permitted him to recognize. In the writing of his poetry, Hayden understood from the start that all acts of literary influence, and most of all those involving any kind of "alternative" tradition, take place in a world in which power is distributed unequally.(11) As Edward Said has written of narrative literature in relation to European imperialism, even the most essentialist accounts of influence always retain, in some form, traces of the relationship between master and disciple, even master and slave (191).

In "Middle Passage," Hayden's revisionist strategy is calculated most of all to challenge Eliot's poetics by drawing upon historical sources alien to Eliot's social world. He originally meant to use this poem as the opening piece in a volume to be entitled The Black Spear, in which he would attempt to "correct the misconceptions and to destroy some of the stereotypes and cliches which surrounded Negro history" (Prose 162). Though Hayden never finished The Black Spear, an early manuscript version, without "Middle Passage," won the Hopwood Prize for creative writing in 1942 when he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, and many of the poems later appeared, extensively revised, in the fifth section of his Selected Poems of 1966.