Robert E(arl) Hayden | Biography

Robert Hayden faced in the mid twentieth century the dilemma that Countee Cullen, one of his literary mentors, had faced during the Harlem Renaissance. Hayden and Cullen were both black, both poets, both very much desirous of being known by their professional appellation rather than their racial one. While Cullen eventually escaped--or at least transcended--the dilemma by writing children's books, Hayden attacked head-on those who attacked him and refused to subordinate art to race even during the turbulent 1960s, when many younger black writers considered him superfluous. Like Gwendolyn Brooks, Hayden became a poet of academe by mastering traditional poetic forms; he could write sonnets and heroic couplets as easily as free verse, and he could invoke literary allusions from ancient Grecian, European, and American literary history. Consistently refusing to believe that there had to be a separate language or some special approach from which to depict the experiences of...
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