Robert Hayden
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Although the majority of Robert Hayden’s writings address racial themes and depicts events in African-American history, he also wrote short poems that capture his own personal experiences. Hayden has an enormous amount of great poems and short stories, but as I read through many of them, I was touched by two specific poems that I felt I could personally relate to. I chose these poems because I am able to put myself into the storyline and understand what the writer is talking about. I believe that a good writer is able to reach any reader regardless of race, gender, or age. Hayden possessed an incredible skill with his language and the structures of his poems that could almost pull the reader right out of their chair and place them in the center of his writings.
Robert Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey on August 4, 1913 in Detroit, Michigan. His mother left him in the care of his neighbors, William and Sue Ellen Hayden, when he was just eighteen months old while she left for New York. The Haydens never legally adopted Robert but they rechristened him as Robert Hayden and took care of him as if he had been their own child.
Hayden attended Detroit City College and Michigan University. During his time at Michigan, Hayden was able to continue his lifelong interest in writing and acting. The most important part of this time was that he had the opportunity to study with W.H.
Auden. Auden at the time was a visiting professor who spent time reading some of Hayden’s works and giving him suggestions and valuable criticisms. Hayden credited Auden for helping him develop his own personal style in writing. After he graduated in 1944 he started his career as an instructor of literature, and Frisk University and then at the University of Michigan. He considered himself foremost a poet and only continued to teach in order to earn a living and to support his wife and daughter.
The first thing I had learned about Hayden’s style before I began reading his actual poems was that he frequently used first-person point of view. Many critics mimic the same thoughts when they discuss how a large majority of his poems were based on his personal experience. He uses his recollection of himself in relation to something else: other characters, different experiences, and even through works of art. He tends to reflect back on numerous times of his childhood. They are clearly personal and some almost seem biographical as he remembers his past and his family as he grew older. These writing are not usually happy for him or easy to put on paper for everyone to see. They seem to bring up pain, guilt, sorrow and a sense of suffering. His writings reflect what he feels on the inside: lost identity, loneliness, and his longing need for attention.
In “Those Winter Sundays” Hayden tells a story about a son looking back at his father during his childhood. The poem describes a father that through words doesn’t necessarily show love or affection towards his family. It captures the need of love from a distant father to his child. Through reading this poem, it is discovered that the love the son was looking for was always present it was just communicated more through the fathers efforts and less through the type of tenderness that is expected from a child. He
explains in small details his fathers suffering. The man who performs hard labor all week long to support his family gets up early, even on Sunday, before anyone else to go out in the extremely cold weather. His hands are cracked and achy from his hard work that he performed throughout the week. Despite all his suffering the father still gets up on Sunday morning to make sure that his family will wake up to a warm house and will have their shoes newly polished. From a child’s perspective this actions are not signs of love, but as Hayden grew up he realized that everything that his father did for him was his way of showing how much he truly loved him. There is a sense of fearfulness as Hayden mentions “chronic angers”. He may have feared his father so much that he didn’t realize that he was constantly sacrificing his own comfort and health for the happiness and security of his family. I feel that through writing this poem, Hayden realized how ungrateful he and his family were towards the father. As he writes, “no one ever thanked him” I think he regrets that all of his fathers suffering and efforts went unacknowledged by others. The tone of this poem seems to be on the sad side because this son never had a chance to have a better relationship with his father and it took so many years to realize the love that was always there in his life. I think that by writing this poem, Hayden was paying homage to his father and his memory. I can relate to this poem because when I was young my dad traveled all the time for work. I really only