Biography Essay

Even though Robert Hayden himself considered it a secondary consideration for the evaluation of his work, he is still known primarily as a black poet, and the subjects of many of his poems make use of his heritage and experience as a black American. But he stands out among poets of his race for his staunch avowal that the work of black writers must be judged wholly in the context of the literary tradition in English, rather than within the confines of the ethnocentrism sometimes found in contemporary literature written by blacks. In a 1968 interview in Negro Digest, for example, he asserts that a so-called black aesthetic would only be possible in a predominantly black culture, but that even black African writers do not subscribe to such an aesthetic, and he finally dismisses it as "protest and racist propaganda in a new guise." Hayden's work has...