The Spiritual Vision of the First Black Poet Laureate

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.