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

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Brian Conniff

Still, Hayden could not effectively use his research to answer "The Waste Land" until he had established a critical understanding of Eliot's poetics. At the end of the summer of 1941, he returned to Michigan, where he continued his research and enrolled in a course taught by W. H. Auden. Under the influence of Auden's teaching, Hayden's understanding of modern poetry, and Eliot in particular, was caught in an intellectual landslide. Auden still spoke of Eliot as a close friend, and regarded him as the leading arbiter of current literary taste, but he was also in the midst of a prolonged, difficult moral questioning of his own earlier poetry. Most of all, in 1941, Auden was struggling to reconcile his early leftist politics with his recent reading of modern theology, especially the Christian realism of Reinhold Neibuhr - often deliberately obscuring his earlier positions but still subjecting his poetry to the questions of conscience raised by the rise of Naziism, the fall of the Spanish Republic, and the ongoing war in Europe. Auden's understanding of Christianity was significantly different from Eliot's increasingly millennial vision of a homogeneous Christian culture and before long, most notably in For the Time Being (1942), he would reject Eliot's peculiar fusion of social crisis and reactionary ideology.

Auden's efforts to remake himself as a Christian intellectual led him to challenge the very idea of a stable literary canon. A couple of years before Hayden met him, in his "New Year Letter," Auden had satirized the prevailing concept of literary influence, the idea that anyone who dares to write poetry must face "interrogation" by "The grand constructions of the dead" (163). Dismissing this kind of purely literary anxiety, Auden had claimed for the poet a radical freedom to reshape the canon in order to serve immediate social needs, moral imperatives, and even personal whims:

Each one, so liberal is the law,

May choose whom he appears before,

Pick any influential ghost

From those whom he admires most. (164)

By the time Hayden came along, Auden's method of teaching involved an apparently endless rearrangement of texts in constellations that were provisional, deliberately unconventional, and often downright playful. Another of Auden's students at Michigan, Donald Pearce, has described Auden's teaching at this time as driven by a "sense of verbal text as interdisciplinary conflux, or event . . . of convergent-and-explosive text" (157). Tossed into one of Auden's textual "confluxes," Eliot's works could never appear as sacred, or as secure, as they were so often made out to be: For instance, in the reading list for Auden's course in the fall of 1941, Eliot's essays and Family Reunion appear alongside more than two dozen other books, including Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Nietszche's The Case of Wagner, and Rimbaud's Season in Hell (Miller 27).

As eccentric as they must have seemed to many of his poor students, Auden's exercises in textual convergence were motivated by a developing sense of moral purpose. Mostly through his reading of Niebuhr, Kierkegaard, and Charles Williams, Auden had recently come to believe that the individual is far more capable of moral action than any larger social group can ever be. Primarily for this reason, the undermining and reconstruction of an authorized tradition was more than just the individual poet's prerogative. At the very least, it was a moral responsibility. At best, it could be a religious vocation.