HAYDEN, ROBERT (born Asa Bundy Sheffey, 4 August 1913–25 February 1980), American poet, essayist, and educator who became the first African American to serve as US poet laureate. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Hayden had a scarring childhood—his parents separated before he was born and he was raised by foster parents who also had a troubled marriage. Slight of stature and suffering from extreme nearsightedness, he was taunted at school and retreated into the world of books, becoming a voracious reader.
In 1932 Hayden enrolled at Detroit City College and majored in English literature. He advanced to graduate work at the University of Michigan, where he studied with the poet W. H. Auden. His first collection of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust, was published in 1940.
Hayden’s poetry was characterized by a deep engagement with the African American experience—his subjects included Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, and Harriet Tubman—expressed with exacting formal rigor. Alongside this was strong universalist current running throughout his work that can be traced to his religious convictions: Hayden was a lifelong adherent of Bahaism, a religion founded in the nineteenth century that emphasized the brotherhood of mankind. He disliked it when his work was referred to as “Black literature”—what he called, dismissively, “racial utterance”—as he believed his poetry should be read as emanating from a more broadly humanist perspective.
In the 1960s the younger generation scrutinized the purported universalism of Hayden’s work less indulgently; at a writers’ conference in 1966 he was labeled an “Uncle Tom” for his rejection of the concept of Black literature and for his desire to be seen as an American poet first and foremost. And yet that same year Hayden published one of his most searching examinations of the African American experience, A Ballad of Remembrance. This collection, which included the tour de force poem “Middle Passage,” explored the legacy of slavery and its enduring impact on Black American identity.
In 1966 Hayden was awarded the grand prize at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal; ten year later he was named poet laureate of the United States.
Hayden was a dedicated teacher and mentor, imparting his passion for poetry to countless students—including the prolific author Julius Lester—over long tenures at Fisk University and the University of Michigan. He has had a large influence on subsequent generations of poets and helped pave the way for greater recognition of Black voices in American literature.