"Something Patterned, Wild, and Free": Robert Hayden's Angles of Descent and the Democratic Unconscious

Abstract

[Interviewer] it is nearly a cliche to say that Robert Hayden has the best underground reputation of any poet in America. How do you respond to that? [Hayden] (Laughs.) I say Hear! Hear! (Hayden, Collected Prose 203) diver had to admit that he couldn't surface again alone, without help. Certainly, for me, an admission of almost complete defeat.... Well, this sounds like melodrama, sure enough, but it's ice cold reality of which I speak. (Hayden, in a letter to Michael Harper [Nicholas 997]) Poetry is really distilled empathy. (Yusef Komunyakaa, Blue Notes 126) In Answering 'The Waste Land': Robert Hayden and the Rise of the African American Poetic Sequence, Brian Coniff shows how Hayden's poems alter assumptions about the intersection of history and modernist poetics. Coniff terms modernist poetics such as Hayden's post-traditional. He explains that the post-traditional poet is certainly conscious--in fact, often intensely conscious--of tradition. At the same time, though, he or she manages, in one way or another, to view any distinctly literary tradition as historically contingent....Most often...to address some perceived crisis (489). He follows with brilliant readings which show how Hayden's vision goes beyond the mainstream modernist grounding in private neurosis [that] Eliot's poetry had helped make fashionable (496). Coniff supplies crucial insights into how African-American approaches to modernism emerge from the distinctive features of black encounters with the history of modernity. Like all modernisms, African-Ameri can modernisms have one foot in the historical past, one in the present. While they've attracted almost no critical attention at all, Hayden's poems set in his cultural present contribute to this cultural axis of black modernism. Like all notable African-American modernist artists, Hayden understood that confrontations with modernity are historically contingent. Indeed, nearly all of the scholarship devoted to Hayden concerns his treatment of nineteenth-century subject matter in poems such as Middle Passage, Runagate Runagate, The Ballad of Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass. Very little has been written about Hayden's nuanced appreciation of how modernist poetics are culturally contingent. For all the histrionics surrounding Hayden's universalism and his refusal join the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s, Hayden's poems are replete with deeply resonant images of immediate black cultural reality through which he explores the complex interactions between psychological depth and cultural tradition. Hayden's poetry consistently demonstrates the ability to excavate the interlocking and cultural contingencies and freedoms of black subjectivity while eluding the oppositional politics which confined the political and cultural era in which he lived. In these poems he explores the classic modernist intersections between objectivity and subjectivity, intimacy and abstraction. He combines the oppositional poles to achieve points of view and review impossible from one or the other. In the present essay, using The Diver as the methodological paradigm, I show how Hayden's artistic vision achieves a depth of perception from which the divisions that inform oppostional politics become unstable. Far from a naive universalism, as The Diver images and the epigram above confirms, the pressure of that depth perception was as dangerous for Hayden as it was necessary to the (post) tradition of black modernism. result is Hayden's complex poetic vision of the strife and possibility embedded in America's fragmented intra-and inter-racial/cultural landscape. In his best work, Hayden derives, sustains, and refines this vision in relation to his excavation of what I'll call the democratic unconscious. In this space, Hayden explores the ever-shifting, non-rational nature of the unconscious to create montages of democratic exchange. …