Religion & Politics Explores Robert Hayden's Legacy
The online journal Religion & Politics, a "Project of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis," discovers first black poet laureate Robert Hayden's spiritual vision. Hayden revered Frederick Douglass, writing a poem with the same name. Religion & Politics's Josef Sorett explains, "this poetic act of remembrance also seemed to renew the writer’s gaze on 'freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing' in the early years of the tumultuous 1960s." From there:
Here Hayden’s own utopian vision in verse was inspired by the example of Frederick Douglass’s life. Yet this one poem was also emblematic of Hayden’s larger artistic vocation, which fused religious and literary themes and drew lessons from the wells of history.
While African American history, in particular, was a valuable resource across his literary career, Robert Hayden’s poetry also reflected the constraints and possibilities of his own biography, beliefs, and historical moment. More often than not, his aesthetic did not lend itself to a neat alignment with the orthodox race politics or religious dogmas of the times in which he lived. Born in 1913, Hayden grew up in Detroit, Michigan. As a young man, he worked for Detroit’s WPA Federal Writers Project during the 1930s, and then honed his craft further at the University of Michigan in the early 1940s under the tutelage of W. H. Auden. Also during the 1940s, Hayden and his wife Erma embraced the teaching of the Persian prophet Baha’u’llah and joined the American Baha’i community. Thus, he wrote both as a black American and, for many years, as a member of the American Baha’i community. Later in his career Hayden would confess to struggling with his beliefs. Yet his poetry drew deeply on the Baha’i faith, a religious tradition that continues to be considered non-traditional and which marked him as marginal in black literary circles for much of his career. Even still, so much of Robert Hayden’s poetry plumbed the particulars of his own “black” experience. Rather than an elision of race politics, Hayden’s refusal of such modifiers as “negro” or “black” was born, at least in part, out of religious commitment. As he eventually explained in an interview with the editor Richard Layman, “I believe in the essential oneness of all people and I believe in the basic unity of all religions. I don’t believe that races are important. … These are all Bahá’í points of view, and my work grows out of this vision.” For Baha’i adherents like Hayden, relinquishing racial identification was part of a process of achieving spiritual maturity.
Read on at Religion & Politics.