Those Winter Sundays (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Throughout much of his early career Robert Hayden was relatively ignored by poetry critics. Much of the attention he did receive came as strong criticism against him from those of his own race, African Americans, during the Civil Rights Movement. Some of the more militant black writers claimed that Hayden was denying his heritage by not writing directly about the political experience of being black in America at the time. Hayden asserted that he wanted to be considered an American poet, and not simply a black poet, and at a time when Blacks and America were at odds, certain members of the Black community saw this as a betrayal. The irony is that Hayden was fundamentally concerned with and interested in the history of being black in America. “Middle Passage” explores the frightening experience of a slave ship on its way to America. “The Ballad Of Nat Turner” and his well-known sonnet “Douglass” speak of great black figures in American history. Hayden’s concern was on the scale of history and mythology and not simply that of the current events of the time. He did not want his poems to ever be considered merely political propaganda.

Hayden finally began to get widespread critical recognition with the publication of A Ballad Of Remembrance in 1962. In The Georgia Review John S. Wright referred to him as “full-voiced and with consummate control.” A few years later, Hayden went on to win the grand prize for poetry at the World Festival of Negro Arts at Dakar, Senegal in 1966 for A Ballad of Remembrance. From this point on through the rest of his life Hayden grew in respect and position in the world of American Letters. In 1976, four years before his death, he became the first black writer appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. If there is a criticism to Hayden’s work it might well be that there is only so much of it. His life-long schedule of teaching, increased by his successes, ironically left him limited time to actually do his own work. Regardless of this fact, Robert Hayden’s poetry remains a valuable part of American literature.

What Do I Read Next?

• Richard Howard’s anthology Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry Since 1950 was first published in 1965 and does not include Robert Hayden. It does, however, have an impressive selection of other influential poets of the time, Hayden’s peer group. This provides the reader with a good source of perspective.
• After Robert Hayden’s insistence that he not be considered a “black poet” thrust him into controversy, he showed his awareness of his ethnicity in 1967 by editing Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro Poets. The selections reflect Hayden’s tastes and are generally more conservative than those found in similar anthologies.
• W.E.B. du Bois was a leading intellectual of our century, a black scholar on par with Hayden, who brought racial issues to a new plane of analysis. His best writings were brought together in the 1971 collection A W.E.B. du Bois Reader.
• The poet Langston Hughes, along with Milton Melzer and C. Eric Lincoln, wrote the text for A Pictorial History of Black Americans, published with new material in 1973. The pictures of the fight against segregation in the 1950s and 1960s tell much about what life was like when Hayden wrote this poem. Hayden was a fan of Hughes since childhood.
• Of all the critical histories of black poetry written in recent years, Eugene B. Redmond’s 1976 Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry tells the story most coherently. Appropriately, he gives a large section to Hayden, who was still writing at the time, recognizing that other anthologies often left him out because of their difficulty categorizing him.