"Here Only the Sea is Real": Robert Hayden's Postmodern Passages

Abstract

We'll go and find them. We'll go and ask them for your again. --Robert `Mystery Boy' Looks for Kin in Nashville A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. --Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (15) In the autumn of 1953, at the age of forty, was informed by a clerk in the Office of State Records at Lansing, Michigan that he did not exist. The poet and Fisk University professor had requested a copy of his birth certificate in order to receive a passport and found that his adoptive parents, William and Sue Hayden, had never completed the legal procedures required to lawfully gain custody. Asa Bundy Sheffey, the shy, acutely near-sighted child of divorced neighbors, who was left in the Haydens' care and raided by them, could be located in the records, but not Robert Hayden. It took an affidavit from the poet's birth mother to establish that Earl and Asa Bundy Sheffey were the same individual (Fetrow 2). After this jarring experience, did receive the passport that allowed him passage to on a ford Foundation grant in 1954. Over the next year, he composed the Inference of Mexico poems that would finally appear in a book-length American collection in 1966's Selected Poems, along with several of his acknowledged masterpieces: Middle Passage, Frederick Douglass, and Those Winter Sundays among them. It is in regard to this period, when asked whether he felt like an outsider in the social milieu of urban Mexico, that invoked his favorite and personal cliche: No place is for me, therefore every place is home (Prose 197). This backdrop to Hayden's favorite paradox is a useful entry point into questions of the poet's status as an important but liminal figure in the history of twentieth-century American writing. Hayden's poetic sensibility resists being labeled as a vestige of a conservative, raceless brand of modern poetry that existed prior to the rise of the Black Aesthetic in the 1960s, yet it also resists categorization as part of that sweeping cultural movement. This is the case even though his most original and significant engagements with history and culture stem from his intimacy with African American materials. Such a situation often proved to be hazardous for the poet because he was in a sense caught between two major impulses of American culture. Although Hayden's technique owed much to the aesthetics of Eliotic modernism (Hayden had in this mode no less a classroom instructor than W.H. Auden), his poems quite often range into a different conceptual territory, into spaces filled with questions of selfhood as later figured by theorists of the postmodern era. It is here that a postmodern reading of Hayden's work yields insights into the poet's difficult and important position on a literary threshold. The dual epigraphs that foreground this study crystallize the tensions present in Hayden's work and in his life. A name is not a self, but attempts to mend the disjunct between the two characterize Hayden's career-long poetic project: a self-conscious quest for a unified conception of where Robert Hayden belongs, among his strained family relations, amid the political camps of his writerly contemporaries, and in the largely unreadable patch-workings of American racial history. My aim is to demonstrate that, rather than the notations of a retrograde modernist, or the voice of a conservative race man, much of Hayden's poetry may be read in a light akin to what Brian Conniff suggests as a post-traditional engagement with ideas of history, culture, and the self (489). Where Conniff focuses on Hayden's Middle Passage as a negotiation of the towering influence of Eliot on mid-century poets, I invoke the tradition being enacted, and perhaps to an extent being initiated, through what Michael S. …