Answering "The Waste Land": Robert Hayden and the Rise of the African American Poetic Sequence.

April of 1966 was one of the most eventful and paradoxical months in the history of twentieth-century American poetry. At the Third World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, Robert Hayden's A Ballad of Remembrance was awarded "the Grand Prix" as "the best" recent volume of Anglophone poetry (qtd. by Pool 43). In at least some international literary circles, the prestige of this award roughly matched its Olympic title. The first such event to be held on "independent African soil," the Festival was sponsored by Leopold Sedar Senghor in conjunction with UNESCO and the Societe Africaine de Culture and was attended by over 10,000 people from thirty-seven nations (Vaillant 323).(1) The other finalists in the poetry competition were Derek Walcott's In a Green Night and Christopher Okigbo's Limits. Langston Hughes was one of the judges. Also in attendance were Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, Alioune Diop, Yevgeny Yevtoshenko, and Duke Ellington. Andre Malraux, then French Minister of Culture, seems to have captured the prevailing spirit when he praised the Festival as an indication that Senghor's cultural program was about to shape "the destiny of a continent" (qtd. by Vaillant 323).

For Hayden, though, the Grand Prix was wildly unexpected. He had not yet published a book with a commercial or university press in the United States, and he was still teaching fifteen hours each semester as an associate professor in the English department at Fisk University. Even the Grand Prix itself, when it first arrived, seemed to do him as much harm as good.(2)

In fact, within a few days, while his poetry was being praised in Senegal as the centerpiece of international negritude, back home in Nashville Hayden was being attacked as the scapegoat of choice for a new generation of African American poets.(3) At Fisk's First Black Writers' Conference, a group of writers and students, led by Melvin Tolson, assailed Hayden as the stooge of exploitive capitalists and, all in all, a traitor to his race. For the most part, Tolson and his supporters endorsed the "Black Cultural Nationalism" of Ron Karenga, with its declarations that "all art must reflect and support the Black Revolution" and that "any art that does not discuss and contribute to the revolution is invalid" (33). Hayden's crime was that he refused to be labeled a "Negro poet." From the beginning of the conference, and much to the dismay of most of his audience, he insisted that he should be considered, instead, "a poet who happens to be Negro" (Llorens 60).(4) When he reiterated his position at a panel discussion - which also included Tolson, Ama Bontemps, and Margaret Walker - the advocates of Black Cultural Nationalism reacted as though they had come face to face with the Enemy. Tolson's response was perhaps most characteristic. Among other things, he declared that, "when a man writes, he tells me which way he went in society." "I'm a black poet," he continued, "an African-American poet, a Negro poet. I'm no accident - and I don't give a tinker's damn what you think" (qtd. in Llorens 62-63).(5) One member of the audience even accused Hayden of contributing to the "delusion" of the "young black people" studying at Fisk (64). In the following months, students on the Fisk campus - almost all of whom, as Hayden was well aware, were from backgrounds more privileged than his own - continued to refer to him as an "Uncle Tom" or an "Oreo," believing that he should use the prestige granted by the Grand Prix to authorize and advance their political positions (Hatcher 38).

I begin with these events for three reasons. First of all, it is in these few days that studies of Hayden almost inevitably find their critical center - and, unfortunately, Hayden's defining moment.(6) From a conventionally biographical perspective, this focus might seem reasonable. In the years immediately following the Third World Festival of Negro Arts, Hayden was granted a brief flurry of academic and otherwise official interest. From 1967 to 1969, he was offered a couple of visiting professorships, a permanent position at the University of Louisville, a recording at the Library of Congress, and finally the position at the University of Michigan that he would accept and then occupy for the rest of his life (Williams 32). Nonetheless, it is safe to say that by the end of the 1960s, soon after the Grand Prix and his auspicious association with the negritude movement, and at least until very recently, Hayden would regain and retain his status as "one of the most underrated and unrecognized poets in America" (Lester 4).(7) This neglect is largely the result of a collective choice - usually implicit but nonetheless clear - that academic critics have made in their descriptions of Hayden's career. Hayden's poetry has rarely been considered in terms of its rich affiliations with the work of major international poets - including Walcott, Okigbo, and Cesaire, among many others - as suggested at the Third World Festival. And his poetry has never been seriously considered - at least by mainstream critics - in relation to the major works by younger African American poets who have found it a rich resource and an inspiration.(8) Rather, his poetry has been viewed - by his detractors and most of his supporters - as somehow determined by his one-line answer to the "Negro question," as it was framed by his opponents at the Fisk Conference. For Tolson and the younger writers of the emerging Black Arts Movement, Hayden eventually came to be viewed as a poet of some ability - and some minor historical significance - whose work is irreparably limited and dated because, in their view, it was not sufficiently concerned with issues of race. Even Arna Bontemps, who was often sympathetic with Hayden's work, would conclude after the Fisk Conference that Hayden "doesn't really like that Negro thing" (qtd. in Llorens 61). For a handful of more conservative critics and editors, Hayden's poetry has also maintained a kind of marginal interest - and, ironically, for much the same reason. For instance, in the influential Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair begin their introduction to Hayden's poetry by stating that Hayden "did not subscribe to any esthetic of Black poetry." They describe his poetry in terms of his interest in the work of Countee Cullen, Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and "the English classics" (863), and then include a selection of Hayden's poetry that would seem to suggest, to a reader unfamiliar with his career, that he must have been trying to write a kind of race-free poetry. In either case, Hayden's critical reception has served, more than anything, to obscure and diminish his most formidable accomplishments.

Second, when viewed in the context of the history of American poetry over the past thirty years, the events of April, 1966, point to an even more striking neglect. Recent criticism has remained oblivious to one of the most remarkable developments in contemporary literature: the rise, in part out of Hayden's poetry, of the African American poetic sequence. Because of their particular moment in history, I think, the conferences in Dakar and Nashville were bound to have mixed legacies. Despite the notable absence of the more politically "radical" American writers, the Third World Festival of Negro Arts did help make the rich history of negritude known beyond the cultural centers of Paris and Dakar.(9) At the same time, as a formative moment in the American debate over a "black aesthetic," bringing together a number of still neglected writers on the verge of academic awareness - if not legitimacy - Fisk's First Black Writers' Conference helped expand the audience of such poets as Margaret Walker and Amiri Baraka, among others, and the Second Conference of 1967 would generally be recognized as the impetus for Gwendolyn Brooks's movement toward African poetic forms and what has been called a "new Black consciousness" (Melhem 154). Nonetheless, the universalizing grandeur with which Hayden was praised, on the one hand, and the vehemence with which he was attacked, on the other, suggest that the two conferences, like most events that end up being reconstructed as defining moments, obscured just about as much as they revealed. After all, the often contentious politics surrounding the emerging post-colonial African and Caribbean literature - still loosely grouped at the Dakar conference under the title "negritude" - was just about as foreign to Hayden's sensibilities as the cultural politics of the Fisk Conference.(10) A Baha'i by faith, Hayden was committed to "the affirmation of independent investigation of the truth" and to abstinence from partisan politics of any kind (Hatcher 68-69). Beginning just about a decade later, however, American poets would be better prepared to draw directly from the legacy of Hayden's poetry - at once individualistic and engaged, local and international, highly crafted and improvisational. Clearly conscious of Hayden's example, in recent years such poets as Michael S. Harper, Jay Wright, and Brenda Marie Osbey have been writing highly ambitious poetic sequences, firmly grounded in history, that invoke distinctly heterogeneous heritages with a wide range of formal experimentation.

Third, if the events of April, 1966, are located in the context of a more extensive literary history, Hayden becomes an even more significant figure. His career spans a crucial period, from the early 1940s through the early 1970s, and his poetry eventually plays a major role in the emergence and development of what I have come to call "post-traditional" poetry. This poetry is largely informed by its authors' paradoxical stance toward literary tradition. 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, the post-traditional poet uses this sense of contingency to construct from disparate sources a personal heritage - provisionally, heterogeneously, willfully - in order to address some perceived historical crisis or, especially in recent years, some immediate social need.

Post-traditional poetry has its most conspicuous origins in the mid-1920s, when, just about simultaneously, the leading canonizers of high modernism began to take radical measures to address what seemed to them a profound schism between their most revered traditions and their peculiar historical interpretations of post-War Europe. At this time, writing in Venice, Ezra Pound began to juxtapose paradisal visions with Dante's Inferno and Major Douglas's economics. At the same time, in London, T. S. Eliot, recently established as a cultural icon, began his second "career" as poetry editor at Faber and Gwyer, redefining himself as a "reactionary" man of letters in what was in effect an elaborate attempt to counterbalance his own philosophical uncertainty with a millennial vision of Christian culture. Meanwhile, in Ireland, William Butler Yeats set out on his first deliberate effort to distance himself from his early romantic nationalism - a truly strange journey, by way of a highly personal reclamation of an Anglo-Irish heritage, that would eventually lead him, in the last days of his life, to the striking embrace of common humanity in "The Circus Animal's Desertion" and "Cuchulain Comforted."

By the middle of their careers, these poets were writing as though tradition - as they knew it - was about to come to an end, under the assault of a debased and debasing culture. They cultivated their notions of historical crisis in ways that resulted not only in reactionary cultural politics but also, eventually, in an understanding that, if the sense of literary culture they so cherished could be threatened and even destroyed by the forces of history, then any canon, indeed any culture, might be considered radically contingent.

Of course, at least since the Bollingen Prize controversy of 1949, the efforts of later poets and critics to come to terms with this legacy - specially its disturbing mixture of poetic innovation and reactionary politics, its vast international influence and intense Eurocentrism - has amounted to a kind of collective anxiety attack. By now, though, I think it has become clear that these often embarrassing ancestors have contributed largely - and, politically speaking, despite themselves - to the rise of a post-traditional poetry that has been growing, at least since the mid-1980s, more explicitly heterogenous and more international, both in its sources and its influence, in such works as Adrienne Rich's Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Seamus Heaney's Station Island (1983), and Derek Walcott's Omeros (1990). Considered more broadly, a distinctly post-traditional stance has become increasingly apparent in the linguistic heterogeneity of contemporary Irish poets like Nuala ni Dhomhnaill and Medbh McGuckian, in the communal heritage evident in the prison poetry and autobiographical writing of Jimmy Santiago Baca, and in the remarkable emergence of contemporary poetry by American Indians. For these

later poets, any approximation of a tradition - any communal or even personal heritage - is conceived pragmatically, as one instrument among many others with which they can engage a world that is at once overwhelmingly various and desperately in need.

In this essay, I will focus primarily on Hayden's "Middle Passage," the long early poem that would remain his most significant contribution to the development of post-traditional poetry. In "Middle Passage," he developed an experimental poetics that could examine racism, directly and specifically, by telling an episode of its history in a number of contending voices. Even at this early point in his career, Hayden was able to challenge the modernists' sense of social crisis and give voice to his personal doubts about modernism's moral limitations - in terms that would not even be suggested at the conferences at Dakar and Fisk. In this sense, "Middle Passage" is crucial to any reconsideration of Hayden's career. It anticipates his later "Negro history" poems, including "Runagate Runagate," "The Ballad of Nat Turner," and "Frederick Douglass." It also anticipates a number of Hayden's poems in widely varied historical contexts - most notably "A Ballad of Remembrance," "Night, Death, Mississippi," "Belsen, Day of Liberation," "El-Hajj Malix El-Shabazz," and the important later sequence "Words in the Mourning Time" - in which he explores, often in brutal detail, the psychology and consequences of racism and xenophobia. Throughout this poetry, as William Meredith has put it, "there is scarcely a line of his which is not identifiable as an experience of Black America" (vi).

Eliotic Intonations

For American poets of Hayden's generation, the development of a post-traditional poetry almost inevitably involved some kind of direct confrontation with received modernism. Hayden was certainly no exception. Beginning his career in the early 1940s, he was conspicuously aware of the previous generation's legacy, particularly as it was perceived in the academy. In this view, a few designated "masterpieces," the most conspicuous of which was "The Waste Land," tended to appear as the culmination - both in the sense of the highest attainment and in the sense of the end - of a predominantly English tradition. The post-traditional impulses in the work of the established modernists - Yeats's provisional reconstructions of his own heritage in his final poems, for instance, or the philosophical and linguistic uncertainty of Eliot's "Little Gidding" - were not yet recognized, or had not yet appeared.

Hayden's confrontation with this legacy can be seen in two contrary tendencies of his critical writing. On the one hand, he was prone to monumentalize Eliot's work - as would most academics of his time - by locating it at the end of the Great Tradition. In an overview of "Twentieth Century American Poetry" written for a 1973 textbook entitled The United States in Literature, he begins with a surprisingly conventional narrative account of modern poetry in which he acknowledges "the supremacy of Auden and Eliot" in the 1940s and then finds his conclusion in a description of "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" as expressions of "the spiritual emptiness of industrialized civilization" (Collected Prose 4549). On the other hand, having been raised in Detroit's Paradise Valley, Hayden was also unusually aware, for an academic of his time, of the persistence of folk culture, jazz, and popular song throughout modern poetry. So even in his textbook account he mentions, along the way, the influence of these populist forces on the work of Edward Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and the writers of the Harlem Renaissance - among many others.

Only on rare occasions in his critical writing could Hayden put aside this characteristic ambivalence - and, in doing so, move beyond the positions of both the "academicians and purists" and the Black Cultural Nationalists. Near the end of his career, in an address to the Library of Congress, he was finally able to articulate a more nuanced and culturally grounded understanding of "poetry as a medium, an instrument for social and political change":

Poetry does make something happen, for it changes sensibility. In the early stages of a culture it helps to crystallize the language and is a repository for value, belief, ideals. The Griot in African tribes keeps names and legends and pride alive. Among the Eskimos the shaman or medicine man is a poet. In ancient Ireland and Wales the bard was a preserver of the culture (Collected Prose 11)

From a perspective with this range of cultural and historical reference, the conventional academic canon of the mid-century - which usually seemed, with Eliot in his place, so complete - suddenly appears temporary, limited, and relatively inconsequential. So, in the same passage, Hayden is able to reconsider poetic tradition in terms that are personal, pragmatic, provisional, and moral:

A point to consider: What would I as a poet do if my people were rounded up like the Jewish people in Germany under the Nazis? Claude McKay's sonnet "If We Must Die"; the poems of the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos that were recited and sung by men and women fighting in the streets for the freedom of their country; Pablo Neruda, William Butler Yeats, Emily Sachs, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Walt Whitman; they stand out as poets even if you dislike their politics. To be a poet, it seems to me, is to care passionately about justice and one's fellow human beings. (11)

In this construction of a living poetic heritage, Hayden no longer sees tradition as a "line of development," leading toward an inevitable poetic conclusion. He is arranging writers, in heterogeneous combinations, to address a particular historical problem with a poetic vision of justice and compassion.

One irony in Hayden's situation is that, obvious political differences aside, this general method of overcoming the canon of the day is something he shared not only with a number of his contemporaries but also, in a way he himself never recognized, with the canonized modernists themselves. Like Yeats, Pound, and Eliot - especially in the later stages of their careers - Hayden's most basic tendency was to reconstruct a standard canon and, at the same time, to locate himself outside this canon in a way that highlighted its limitations and, ultimately, its historical contingency. In this sense, his method was similar to that of philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, as Richard Rorty has described it, when they redescribed their predecessors in terms of a tradition that seemed, in some sense, to have reached its end. Canon construction then became a strategy for dealing with "the problem of ironist theory . . . the problem of how to overcome authority without claiming authority" (105). In this sense, at least from the mid-1920s on, each of the major modernists eventually came to see himself as Hayden saw Eliot: at the end of the English poetic tradition; as, in some manner of speaking, the last poet.

For those of us who have entered the academy well after the rise of postmodern theory, I think it is difficult to appreciate just how common, and at times overwhelming, the monumentalizing view of Eliot was in the 1940s. Overcoming "The Waste Land" was a problem Hayden shared with such different poets as H.D. when she wrote her Trilogy, William Carlos Williams when he wrote the first four books of Paterson, and even Charles Olson, early in the next decade, when he began The Maxim us Poems. As these poets progressed through the 1940s and 1950s, they were not worried, as their predecessors had been, that tradition, as they knew it, was about to end, and that therefore there might no longer be anything of significance to write; rather, they were driven, and at times practically inebriated, by a sense of freedom they associated with the end of tradition, in the conventional academic sense of the term. That is why, just when literary criticism was being established in an unprecedented state of institutional security and influence within the academy, and mainstream critics were settling on a totalizing view of poetic tradition, a number of American poets were undertaking some of the most ambitiously experimental work of the century.

That is also the reason that, no matter how monumental high modernist poetics might have seemed to be when Hayden began his career, his confrontation with "The Waste Land" should not be construed as the kind of agonistic struggle against "belatedness" imagined by Harold Bloom in books like The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, and Agon. Hayden's revision of Eliot's poetics was far more conscious and strategic than Bloom's Freudian mythology would allow, and more engaged with history than Bloom's metaphysics and his preoccupation with private irony have ever permitted him to recognize. In the writing of his poetry, Hayden understood from the start that all acts of literary influence, and most of all those involving any kind of "alternative" tradition, take place in a world in which power is distributed unequally.(11) As Edward Said has written of narrative literature in relation to European imperialism, even the most essentialist accounts of influence always retain, in some form, traces of the relationship between master and disciple, even master and slave (191).

In "Middle Passage," Hayden's revisionist strategy is calculated most of all to challenge Eliot's poetics by drawing upon historical sources alien to Eliot's social world. He originally meant to use this poem as the opening piece in a volume to be entitled The Black Spear, in which he would attempt to "correct the misconceptions and to destroy some of the stereotypes and cliches which surrounded Negro history" (Prose 162). Though Hayden never finished The Black Spear, an early manuscript version, without "Middle Passage," won the Hopwood Prize for creative writing in 1942 when he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, and many of the poems later appeared, extensively revised, in the fifth section of his Selected Poems of 1966.

Several critics have discussed the significance of "Middle Passage" to Hayden's career-long effort to incorporate revisionist history into his poetry.(12) At the same time, however, most of the critics who have noticed the connections between Hayden's poetry and Eliot's have assumed that Hayden was, at least in matters of poetics, little more than a dutiful disciple, learning matters of technique from the master, and in some cases imitating him directly.(13)

In fact, the only readers who seem to have understood the kind and degree of confrontation involved in Hayden's reading of Eliot are those younger poets who have turned to Hayden's poetry as a resource for continuing innovation. For instance, in a letter to Hayden, Michael S. Harper has described his poetry as "a real testament" to "complexity and historical consciousness" (in Nicholas 995). Elsewhere, in a reminiscence written on the occasion of Hayden's death, Harper has referred to "Middle Passage" as, in part, an "answer" to "The Waste Land" - that is, a poetic and historical challenge rather than a reverent echo. Harper recognizes that Hayden tried, through his knowledge of diverse poetic traditions, to move "beyond many of the experiments steeped in conscious modernism" (184). According to Harper, "Middle Passage" recalls "the schizoid past's brutalities" in order to confront Eliot's poetry with "a broad and pungent social reality" (184). Along similar lines, Jay Wright has written that "Middle Passage" alters Eliot's famous claim that a poet's fundamental responsibility is to language - and at the same time answers the criticism of many of Hayden's "younger contemporaries" - by demonstrating that "a language has a history and a relationship to other languages" that is more complex, and far more political, than Eliot ever imagined ("Desire's" 18). To these poets, Hayden's view of Anglo-American modernism is much like that of Houston Baker in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance: Even though such iconic figures as Eliot and Joyce and Pound confronted the "changed condition of humankind" in the early twentieth century with "seriousness and sincerity," to use Baker's words, they also "mightily restricted the province of what constituted the tumbling of the towers, and they remained eternally self-conscious of their own pessimistic 'becomings'" (4).

As he worked on the manuscript of The Black Spear in New York City during the summer vacation of 1941, Hayden immersed himself in the various histories, journals, notebooks, and ships' logs related to the slave trade in the Schomburg collection (Prose 170-71). Most significantly, at least for "Middle Passage," he also read the account of an 1839 slave mutiny on a schooner named the Amistad in Muriel Rukeyser's remarkable biography of the theoretical chemist Willard Gibbs. Gibbs' father Josiah was, for most of his life, a retiring professor of theology and sacred literature at Yale; in his more daring moments, he was an amateur practitioner of the new German philology. But when a group of slaves who had seized control of the Amistad mysteriously appeared on Long Island, only to be thrown in jail, the elder Gibbs came to their aid, teaching them some English and finding translators for their legal defense among the African laborers in the ports of New York. He also seized the opportunity to begin a study of Mendi grammar.

Still, Hayden could not effectively use his research to answer "The Waste Land" until he had established a critical understanding of Eliot's poetics. At the end of the summer of 1941, he returned to Michigan, where he continued his research and enrolled in a course taught by W. H. Auden. Under the influence of Auden's teaching, Hayden's understanding of modern poetry, and Eliot in particular, was caught in an intellectual landslide. Auden still spoke of Eliot as a close friend, and regarded him as the leading arbiter of current literary taste, but he was also in the midst of a prolonged, difficult moral questioning of his own earlier poetry. Most of all, in 1941, Auden was struggling to reconcile his early leftist politics with his recent reading of modern theology, especially the Christian realism of Reinhold Neibuhr - often deliberately obscuring his earlier positions but still subjecting his poetry to the questions of conscience raised by the rise of Naziism, the fall of the Spanish Republic, and the ongoing war in Europe. Auden's understanding of Christianity was significantly different from Eliot's increasingly millennial vision of a homogeneous Christian culture and before long, most notably in For the Time Being (1942), he would reject Eliot's peculiar fusion of social crisis and reactionary ideology.

Auden's efforts to remake himself as a Christian intellectual led him to challenge the very idea of a stable literary canon. A couple of years before Hayden met him, in his "New Year Letter," Auden had satirized the prevailing concept of literary influence, the idea that anyone who dares to write poetry must face "interrogation" by "The grand constructions of the dead" (163). Dismissing this kind of purely literary anxiety, Auden had claimed for the poet a radical freedom to reshape the canon in order to serve immediate social needs, moral imperatives, and even personal whims:

Each one, so liberal is the law,

May choose whom he appears before,

Pick any influential ghost

From those whom he admires most. (164)

By the time Hayden came along, Auden's method of teaching involved an apparently endless rearrangement of texts in constellations that were provisional, deliberately unconventional, and often downright playful. Another of Auden's students at Michigan, Donald Pearce, has described Auden's teaching at this time as driven by a "sense of verbal text as interdisciplinary conflux, or event . . . of convergent-and-explosive text" (157). Tossed into one of Auden's textual "confluxes," Eliot's works could never appear as sacred, or as secure, as they were so often made out to be: For instance, in the reading list for Auden's course in the fall of 1941, Eliot's essays and Family Reunion appear alongside more than two dozen other books, including Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Nietszche's The Case of Wagner, and Rimbaud's Season in Hell (Miller 27).

As eccentric as they must have seemed to many of his poor students, Auden's exercises in textual convergence were motivated by a developing sense of moral purpose. Mostly through his reading of Niebuhr, Kierkegaard, and Charles Williams, Auden had recently come to believe that the individual is far more capable of moral action than any larger social group can ever be. Primarily for this reason, the undermining and reconstruction of an authorized tradition was more than just the individual poet's prerogative. At the very least, it was a moral responsibility. At best, it could be a religious vocation.

Before long, all of these revisionary forces - the "Negro history," the understanding of tradition as an array of cultural fragments provisionally constructed by an individual writer, the commitment to canon reconstruction as a moral imperative - would provide Hayden with his own means of answering "The Waste Land."

Though "Middle Passage" was not finished in time for the Hopwood contest, The Black Spear manuscript did include a preliminary response to Eliot. This poem is far less impressive than "Middle Passage," but it does suggest just how quickly and systematically Hayden was developing his own revisionary poetics. "Schizophrenia" is a superficially Eliotic poem in two voices, each of which speaks a refrain with variations. The first voice recalls the "heap of broken images" from "The Waste Land" and its nearly exhausted anguish in the face of cultural and spiritual disintegration:

We were trying to harvest the fragments

of our scattered spirits,

but it was the blitzkrieg's year,

and the bombs were failing. (185)

"The blitzkrieg's year" is the most obvious among many symptoms of a culture so fragmented, so far beyond any hope of repair, that it seems to have come to the end of its history. The war continues, somehow, beyond human agency; yet, at the same time, it is all too ordinary, something like the weather. The second voice in "Schizophrenia" supplies the predictable metaphoric connection between this cultural catastrophe and personal insanity. For this second voice, the falling bombs are little more than background noise for a series of private nightmares: "I saw a man in a cracked gold mirror / and a man in surrealist streets"; "I saw a pale girl, savage of eye, / fondling a headless doll"; and so on.(14) Like a conspicuously modernist Parsifal, the narrator has set out on a quest of some significance, apparently, but he is unable to figure out where he should go or what he should do: "One of these tasks is mine, / and the other is mine, / but which is mine they won't tell me" (185). Needless to say, it is never clear just who "they" might be, these unhelpful shades. But that hardly seems to matter, either, since, as it turns out, within a few lines, both of the poem's speakers discover that they are locked up "in padded cells."

Poetically, the most basic problem with "Schizophrenia" is that its two voices sound far too much alike to answer each other - let alone anyone else - in any very meaningful way. Even if they are meant to be spoken by the same person, they could hardly support any respectable diagnosis of schizophrenia - perhaps clinical depression, or echolalia, or some such thing, but not schizophrenia. And, more importantly, these voices seem to be far too distant from recognizable events for "the blitzkrieg's year" to have any historical resonance, even in a time of war. Both voices echo Eliot's diction, syntax, rhythms, and repetitive phrasing, almost to the point of parody, but never to any discernable purpose.

Still, at this early point in Hayden's career, I think this little experiment proved to be very valuable: He learned that he could not answer Eliotic despair, in any very useful way, with his own rendition of Eliotic despair. By doing Eliot in two very similar voices - voices that just about any reader of poetry in the 1940s would find familiar - he discovered that all this preoccupation with the "tumbling towers" of some universalized Western culture, the "split shards / of the major illusion," could be patently self-indulgent. In "Schizophrenia," the speakers' vaguely nostalgic longing to recover the "shattered spirit" of the past only hides their mutual impulse to turn the harshest realities of the ongoing war, the falling bombs, into an analogue for some vaguely personal anxiety, just as "The Waste Land's" compulsive allusion and nervous voices tend to obscure the social conditions of post-World War I London.

"Middle Passage"

For all "Schizophrenia's" shortcomings - Hayden would never include it in any of his published collections - the poem's half-hearted experiment in Eliotic voices soon developed into a more pointed and far more powerful response. In "Middle Passage," Hayden once again explored the theme of cultural "schizophrenia," but this time within the historical context provided by his research on the slave trade. This historical material gave him the means by which he could abandon the kind of psychological posturing - the inevitable blending of dreams and consciousness, self and other, world war and private neurosis - Eliot's poetry had helped make fashionable.

"Middle Passage's" most significant element of "social reality," as Harper would put it, was provided primarily by Rukeyser's account of the strange series of events set in motion by the Amistad mutiny. When the mutiny occurred, the Amistad held fifty-three Africans who had been part of a much larger group, probably captured in one of the local wars fought, in those days, primarily for the acquisition of slaves. They had already been dealt by traders in Sierra Leone, sent under a Portuguese flag to the thriving market in Havana, bought by two Spaniards named Ruiz and Montez, placed in irons, and shipped off once again, this time to Guanaja, the main port of Principe. Their capture and transportation violated the decree of Spain of 1817 - and, for that matter, "all the treaties then in existence" among European countries and the United States (Rukeyser 16).

Until the fourth night after the Amistad's departure from Havana, their crossing was much like countless others on the middle passage. Hayden makes this point by constructing the poem's main narrative so that it emerges in the midst of fragments drawn from assorted accounts of earlier journeys. In this way, he is able to tell the story of the Amistad against a background of sickness, madness, fire, rape, and other cruelties:

"Deponeth further sayeth The Bella J

left the Guinea Coast

with cargo of five hundred blacks and odd

for the barracoons of Florida:

"That there was hardly room 'tween-decks for half

the sweltering cattle stowed spoon-fashioned there;

that some went mad of thirst and tore their flesh

and sucked the blood:

"That Crew and Captain lusted with the comeliest

of the savage girls kept naked in the cabins." (49-50)

On that fourth night, however, the Amistad's journey took an unusual turn. After just about all of the ship's crew had gone to sleep, having spent much of the day battling a storm, the slaves managed to get hold of machetes being sent along to cut sugar cane in the New World. Led by a man named Cinquez - "a powerful young rice planter, a powerful leader" (Rukeyser 18) - they quickly seized control of the ship, killing the captain and the cook, who had threatened them throughout their journey. Then, because they believed they would need experienced sailors to navigate back home, they decided to spare the lives of Montez, Ruiz, and a cabin boy who had helped them as a translator.

This decision backfired. For sixty-three days Montez and Ruiz managed to delay their return, guiding the ship east by day and then turning northwest by night when they knew their captors would be unable to judge their direction. Zigzagging across the Atlantic in this way, the Amistad soon became the subject of local legend, with reports in the American press of a "phantom ship" following a route so incomprehensible that it must be driven by ghosts. When the Amistad finally landed at Montauk, Long Island, the Africans were thrown in the county jail. Accordingly, in "Middle Passage" it is Montez and Ruiz, suddenly set free, who tell this part of the story:

It sickens me

to think of what I saw, of how these apes

threw overboard the butchered bodies of

our men, true Christians all, like so much jetsam.

Enough, enough. The rest is quickly told:

Cinquez was forced to spare the two of us

you see to steer the ship to Africa,

and we like phantoms doomed to rove the sea

voyaged east by day and west by night,

deceiving them, hoping for rescue,

prisoners on our own vessel, till

at length we drifted to the shores of this

your land, America, where we were freed

from our unspeakable misery. (53)

The story of the Amistad provided Hayden with a narrative framework within which he could include accounts of cruelty, from various sources, that make "The Waste Land's" sense of "horror" seem timid and self-indulgent. But what would turn out to be just as important - at least for Hayden's development as a poet - was Rukeyser's less dramatic account of the series of trials and political maneuvers that began once the Amistad had landed on Montauk. This portion of the Gibbs biography, along with courtroom testimony by Montez and Ruiz published a hundred years earlier in John Barber's A History of the Amistad Captives, provided Hayden with a vision of a less personal, more historically grounded kind of "schizophrenia": the assorted moral duplicities in mainstream American culture that sustained the slave trade. In these accounts, he discovered a labyrinth of hypocrisy and rationalization so intricate that, to account for it with any degree of accuracy, he needed to master a more complex and ironic interplay of contending voices.

When the Amistad slaves landed on Long Island, they were surprised to discover that their arrival in a "free state" did not mean they would be set free. Of course, they "claimed freedom, charging Ruiz and Montez with assault, battery, and false imprisonment" (Rukeyser 36-37). And, for their part, Montez and Ruiz claimed possession of the Amistad and its passengers.

Strangely, though, they were not the only ones to make such a claim. Led by a Captain Green, who lived down the road, a group of Long Islanders also "claimed salvage on the vessel, the cargo, and the slaves" (37) on the grounds that they had been the first to speak to Cinquez and his men when they had come ashore looking for water. Still another claim was made by a certain Lieutenant Gedney, who, having seen the Amistad approaching Montauk, thinking it must have been a pirate ship, and hoping for an opportunity to revive his languishing career, had ordered his own crew to follow. Meanwhile, the Spanish Minister, with the support of the pro-slavery press in the United States, claimed the ship and its "cargo" for Spain, arguing that the trials should be held in Cuba since "a 'trial and execution' in Connecticut was not as good" (37). Not to be outdone in a matter of patriotic duty, the local District Attorney "claimed that the Africans should be held, according to the 1819 Act, subject to the pleasure of the President" (37). Secretary of State John Forsyth and Attorney General Felix Grundy intervened, trying to keep the proceedings within federal jurisdiction so that they might be able to turn the slaves and cargo over to "persons designated" by the Spanish Minister. Even President Van Buren considered getting involved - he too was inclined to return the ship and the slaves to Spain - until he realized that he lacked an extradition treaty.

All things considered, it is hardly surprising that, in Hayden's account, Montez and Ruiz are perplexed. Most of all, they have trouble understanding how some Americans - especially the members of the anti-slavery movement who sponsored the Africans' defense - fail to recognize their right to what they consider their own property. When Hayden gives them a chance to speak for themselves, they focus their astonishment primarily on John Quincy Adams, who has taken up the cause of the Amistad slaves and will eventually argue for their freedom in their final appeal before the Supreme Court. When the events of the poem take place, Adams is seventy-three years old and returning to court after a thirty-two-year hiatus. Even by his own account, he is not in very good shape, with "a shaking hand, a darkening eye, a drowsy brain, and with all of my faculties dropping from me one by one, as the teeth are dropping from my head" (qtd. in Rukeyser 46). To the Spanish slavers, he seems to have been transported from the Roman Empire, rhetorically extravagant and oblivious to the practical demands of their very modern business:

We find it paradoxical indeed

that you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty

are rooted in the labor of your slaves

should suffer the august John Quincy Adams

to speak with so much passion of the right

of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters

and with his Roman rhetoric weave a hero's

garland for Cinquez. I tell you that

we are determined to return to Cuba

with our slaves and there see justice done. Cinquez -

or let us say "the Prince" - Cinquez shall die. (53)

Ironically, it is with this slaver's speech that "Middle Passage" enters a maze of moral contradictions: between the law of New York and the broader political interests of the federal government; between the "Christian" slave traders, whose legacy of violence and lust has been documented throughout the poem, and the so-called "apes" who have spared their lives; between the slaves' perception of the United States, during the journey, as "mirage and myth" and these strangely "civilized" events that occur once the ship reaches the "actual shore" (51); between the talk of liberty in the free states and the "roots" of this liberty in slave labor; between the familiar language of Montez and Ruiz, confident in its sense of a culture shared with educated Americans, and the increasing isolation of the poem's main narrative voice, as it traces the history of "dark ships" that move like "Shuttles in the rocking loom of history" (51).

Within this narrative framework, Hayden uses his historical sources to turn Eliot's own poetics against his restricted vision of cultural decline. In "Middle Passage" Hayden makes use of "The Waste Land's" abrupt shifts between multiple voices, its cryptic quotations, its central symbols of fire and water, its references to the sea as the site of transformation, and its mythical hero who must journey through the land of the dead in order to restore a vital society. He even includes a bitter variation on Eliot's variations on Shakespeare. The two passages from The Tempest used by Eliot - Ariel's song, "Full fathom five thy father lies," and Ferdinand's lament for his missing father - are displaced from Prospero's magic island, compressed, and relocated in the hold of a slave ship:

Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,

the corpse of mercy rots with him,

rats eat love's rotten gelid eyes. (51)

By establishing this doubly ironic relationship among his poem, "The Waste Land," and the Shakespearean "original," Hayden undermines the cultural nostalgia that Eliot characteristically imposes upon such passages: the search among the ruins for a once-coherent civilization, the pained intimations of moral decline, the longing almost beyond hope for some reconstruction of the fragmented past that might bring spiritual redemption. To put it another way, in Hayden's allusions, the passages from earlier texts do not appear as a bulwark against the ruinous forces of modernity; they, too, have been transformed so that they carry the indelible marks of history in their imagery and even in their music. After "Middle Passage's" accounts of, among other things, opthalamia, starvation, death by fire, and live people fed to sharks, "The Waste Land's" method of allusion seems painfully literary.

This is the most important difference between "Middle Passage" and "Schizophrenia." In "Middle Passage," Hayden appropriates Eliot's poetics with this distinct purpose - and, in doing so, he develops a morally engaged, pragmatic poetics that would eventually align his work with the post-traditional poetry of a younger generation. Most fundamentally, his answer to "The Waste Land" demonstrates just how Eliot's poem struggles toward moral condemnation, without being able to establish any convincing or consistent moral ground. In this way, Hayden is able to exploit a radical philosophical uncertainty that is one of the pervasive features of Eliot's poetry but is typically obscured by Eliot's later pronouncements on culture and religion. At the center of "The Waste Land's" moral universe, as Eliot and others have noted, is the vision of Tiresias, old and blind, "throbbing between two lives." According to Eliot's famous notes, Tiresias is "the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest" (50):

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest -

I too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. (38)

Of course, Tiresias's vision turns out to be the most famous - and discouraging - seduction in twentieth-century poetry:

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.) (39)

With its shifts between vatic proclamation and mock-heroic deflation, this passage brings "The Waste Land's" method of allusion close to that of English neoclassical satire, with its characteristic manner of exposing contemporary pretensions by holding them up to the standards of an idealized past that is deceptively made to seem available by the imitation of conventional poetic form. But as Ezra Pound understood, I think, in some of his revisions of Eliot's typescript, such a method is fundamentally irreconcilable with either the poem's sense of irreparable fragmentation or its striving to give voice to distinctly modern anxieties. On the other hand, without the ironies generated by its classical and neoclassical allusions, this passage would suggest that Eliot's vision of Western civilization's impending doom must somehow wrench its moral authority from a voyeuristic commentary on an uninspired sexual fling - as if sexual boredom were the end of the world.

In "Middle Passage," Hayden places a reply to Tiresias's vision at his poem's center, both spacially and thematically. For Hayden, the heart of darkness resides in the speech of an anonymous slave trader who, in the course of twenty prosperous years, has come to view his work, from its basic sources to its net profits, as an ordinary business. Loosely based on Theodore Canot's account of his own career in his Adventures of an African Slaver, it is a passage that, I imagine, must have been noticed by the judges at the Senegal conference, given their tendency to view both literature and racism in the context of colonialism:

Aye, lad, and I have seen those factories,

Gambia, Rio Pongo, Calabar;

have watched the artful mongos baiting traps

of war wherein the victor and the vanquished

Were caught as prizes for our barracoons.

Have seen the nigger kings whose vanity

and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah,

Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us.

And there was one - King Anthracite we named him -

fetish face beneath French parasols

of brass and orange velvet, impudent mouth

whose cups were carven skulls of enemies:

He'd honor us with drum and feast and conjo

and palm-oil-glistening wenches deft with love,

and for tin crowns that shone with paste,

red calico and German-silver trinkets

would have the drums talk war and send

his warriors to burn the sleeping villages

and kill the sick and old and lead the young

in coffles to our factories. (50-51)

By placing this speech at the center of "Middle Passage," Hayden also develops the strategy of moral implication he uses when Montez and Ruiz contrast Adams's rhetoric to the economic realities of slavery in America.(15) By including this particular slaver's voice, he is able to widen his net of implication: The speech is effective precisely because it seems so familiar, the words of a man who has simply been carried along in a job that leads him to everyone from local rulers like "King Anthracite" to "factory" workers at the barracoons to lawyers in New York.

Passages like this one suggest that Hayden's rejection of Black Cultural Nationalism, almost twenty-five years later, was primarily determined by the already formidable achievement of his own poetry. He would never be a "Negro poet," if that meant - as it certainly seemed to mean to his audience at the Fisk Conference - that he could not mimic for his own purposes the voices of lynchers and common slavers. He would never be a Negro poet, if that meant he could not use such impersonations to implicate, among many others, the African kings whose vanity and greed were so necessary to the slave trade, especially in its early years when white men rarely entered Africa's interior. And he would never be a Negro poet, if that meant he could not give full voice to historical characters like Montez and Ruiz in order to account, accurately and with sufficient moral complexity, for the contending political and social forces at work when the Amistad captives finally landed in New York.

But even more fundamentally, in his work of the early 1940s Hayden sets out to restore to poetry the sense of contingency by which a particular historical moment - say, for instance, a mutiny aboard a Spanish slave ship - appears vividly uncertain and, for that reason, at that moment, human action is potentially prophetic.(16) The fragmentary narrative in the final lines of "The Waste Land" depends, more than any other passage of the poem, upon the myth of Parsifal, in various incarnations, searching for the Chapel Perilous in his quest to restore, and reconnect, the natural and social orders. "The Waste Land's" other more or less religious allusions - most notably the vision of the disciples on the road to Emmaus and the ritualistic ending of the Upanishads - are more than anything else variations on this theme. This overarching mythic structure and the poem's dominant narrative voice imply that these apparent fragments are ultimately unified in the refuge of a collective unconscious - or some such half-concealed repository of cultural memory and meaning - where they dwell, in their more complete forms, beyond the changes and challenges of history. In this way, Eliot strains poetic metaphysics just about, but not quite, to the point of breaking. Or, to put it another way, in The Waste Land Eliot stops just on the verge of the post-traditional.

On the other hand, by rescuing Cinquez from obscurity - by returning him, through poetry, to living history - Hayden asserts the possibility that an unlikely individual, even after one of the most convoluted journeys through the middle passage and the American courts, can act in a manner that "transfigures many lives." In the end, despite the eloquence of Montez and Ruiz - and the many others who claimed to own him - Cinquez did not die for his part in the mutiny. Somehow, Adams managed to revive his long-neglected skills as a litigator, and the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Cinquez should be released to the missionary society for transportation back to Sierra Leone - along with those other slaves who had managed to survive their journey, imprisonment, and legal odyssey. By ending "Middle Passage" with a poetic account of Cinquez's survival, Hayden transforms "The Waste Land's" theme of transformation. He replaces "mirage and myth" with historical revision and continuance. Even more important, in contrast to Eliot's nostalgia for a stable tradition, supported by an equally stable social order, Hayden ends with a prophetic voice capable of resurrecting the suppressed past in, and beyond, the present:

The deep immortal human wish,

the timeless will:

Cinquez its deathless primaveral image,

life that transfigures many lives.

Voyage through death

to life upon these shores. (55)

And so, a "deep immortal human wish" finds expression in the poetic image - but what is most important is that the poem does not end there. The couplet at the center of this concluding passage balances two visions of Cinquez: For an instant, he is equally a figure within the poem and an individual living in an historical moment. But the sequencing of the couplet's two lines, like the larger movement of this passage, suggests that the poetic image aspires to the status of an individual life, which can transfigure many other lives through prophetic action. The poem and the historical life invest each other with meaning, in a common world, for "life upon these shores."

Hayden and the Contemporary African American Poetic Sequence

Of all the consequences of the literary politics of April, 1966, probably the strangest is that Hayden's poetry - with its radical contingency, historical detail, moral complexity, and formal experimentation - would be so persistently ignored or undervalued by scholars and critics. This neglect can be interpreted within a number of contexts: for instance, the conflict between the cultural politics of New Criticism, in the years of its greatest domination in elite universities, and the Black Arts Movement, as it shaped one generation's discussion of African American poetry; or the recent ascendency of African American novelists like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison; or the declining status of contemporary poetry within the academy over the past forty years or so, with the tendency to relegate poetry to creative writing programs; or the increasing influence of theories that seem to be more readily proven by narrative fiction and, in some cases, popular culture.

But none of these contexts really does much to lessen the irony, or the larger significance, of Hayden's situation. Just as critical approaches more sympathetic to history and issues of race have gained academic acceptance and influence, African American poets have produced a body of work that is, I think, unprecedented in the degree to which it adapts innovative poetics to address historical and racial issues. Yet the criticism has remained virtually oblivious to the poetry. Hayden himself anticipated this problem when he said, in one way or another, any number of times, that discussions of "race and poetry" always seem to turn into discussions of "race."

So, for the most part, it has been left to a younger generation of African American poets to claim and continue Hayden's legacy. These poets have generally begun their careers with a clear recognition of the limitations of both Black Cultural Nationalism, with its tendency toward the kind of rigid political proscription that led to Tolson's denunciation of Hayden, and New Critical aestheticism, with its tendency to ignore race altogether and treat Hayden as a kind of minor formalist. At the same time, these poets have recovered some of the more useful affinities between African American poetry and international negritude that were merely suggested by the conference in Dakar.

Most of all, these more recent poets have drawn from the approach to historical poetry that Hayden began to develop in "Middle Passage." By demonstrating that literary tradition - like history itself, as it is actually being lived - is radically contingent, Hayden made it easier for younger poets to view any given tradition as provisional, even improvisational. To put it in the more familiar terms of literary history, these poets have extended many of the poetic experiments of modernism while historicizing the modernists' sense of historical crisis - that is, the peculiar dread of impending chaos and social disruption, the barbarians-at-the-gates mentality, that so often characterizes the later canon formations of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound.

For instance, in his sequence "Debridement" Michael S. Harper extends Hayden's experiments in multiple voices and historical disjunctions. Using a prosody derived in part from jazz, "Debridement" comments upon a more recent but equally "schizoid" episode of the recent past: the Vietnam War, in which the poem's main character inadvertently wins a Medal of Honor, and the years immediately following, in which he returns to the projects, only to be berated by "militants," then shot and killed by a white store manager who is frightened to see "a car filled with blacks" parked in his neighborhood (Images of Kin 110). Shifting, often with the syncopation of a Charlie Parker solo, between Cambodia, the Projects, and the hospital where its main character dies, "Debridement" depends upon a sense of history in which the past remains oddly alive in the present, and in which it seems that poetry - in particular, a distinctly post-traditional poetry - can provide the resources necessary to bring this past to judgment in a manner that serves the needs of the present.

Hayden's legacy also endures in the poetic sequences of Brenda Marie Osbey, with their multiple voices, disjunctive narratives, and heterogeneous cultural traditions. In works like "Ceremony for Minneconjoux," In These Houses, and most of all the book-length narrative poem Desperate Circumstances, Dangerous Women, Osbey's fefe women recreate a local history of New Orleans' Treme district in heterogeneous voices rich with the rhythms of island songs, okono drums, hoodoo chants, and "root ends / against tamborines" (Ceremony 6). Fittingly, Osbey begins the final sequence of In These Houses with a tribute to Hayden, a variation on his poem "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home." In this poem, Hayden adopts a popular legend from Georgia Sea Island: "It was believed there were certain Africans who, after being brought here as slaves, flew back to Africa. They had magic power and, as I say in the poem, they could just spread their arms and fly away" (Collected Prose 174). Drawing from the personal reminiscences of former slaves, Hayden recounts these legends in a kind of juba, accompanied by "coonskin drum and jubilee banjo":

Do you remember Africa?

O cleave the air and fly away home

My gran, he flew back to Africa,

just spread his arms and

flew away home.

Drifting night in the windy pines;

night is a laughing, night is a longing.

Pretty Malinda, come to me. (Collected Prose 174)

Osbey's tribute recalls not only Hayden's "Daedelus" but also but also the end of "Middle Passage":

amid all the laughter

i manage to fly away home

have yet to perish

in the sea. (Houses 33)

In her poetry, as in Hayden's, legend functions as both local history and living literature. A "tradition" of this kind is not something preserved by the purifiers of language against the corrupting influences of common culture - whether within the boundaries established by the range of allusion and other restrictive gestures of modernist poetics or within the institutional practices of the academy. A "tradition" of this kind is woven by the individual poet from the strands of assorted heritages still alive within her community. It still serves immediate purposes. It is a means of survival.

It seems to me that Hayden's legacy is apparent in similar ways in Melvin Dixon's "Tour Guide: La Maison des Esclaves," Yusef Komunyakaa's "Blues Chant Hoodoo Revival," Elizabeth Alexander's "The Venus Hottentot," and perhaps most significantly Jay Wright's Dimensions of History and The Double Invention of Komo. One way of looking at these works would be to say that they are part of one of the richest - and least appreciated - "traditions" in modern American literature, a "tradition" that undoubtably includes Hayden as a shaping and presiding presence.(17) It is also certainly true that all of these works draw, in one way or another, from what Robert Stepto has called, in a discussion of Wright's poetry, "the tangle of black traditions binding the Americas to West Africa" (x).

But in remarkable ways all of these works point to a more fundamental lesson that should be drawn from the strange events of April, 1966, from Hayden's calculated response to Eliot's poetics - and from the kind of reconsideration of Hayden's career that I am advocating. Terms like tradition and influence can only be applied to this poetry in a manner that is self-conscious and ironic, if at all, for the poetry is so highly attuned to historical, social, cultural, and moral disjunctions that it never pretends to resolve, through direct appropriation of an established poetic convention, any injustice or hypocrisy that remains unresolved in the society at large. Instead, this poetry uses improvisation and linguistic heterogeneity as a means of constantly redescribing, and cultivating, human complexity and dignity.

So I think it would be more accurate and more useful to say that this poetry - which might be called, rather loosely, the contemporary African American poetic sequence - builds on Hayden's legacy by constantly renegotiating relationships between contending traditions and contending social orders. Each of these poets reconstructs, at will, a heritage that is at once personal and historically grounded, continuous and progressively hybrid, in order to serve immediate social need. To put it another way, for more than fifty years now, Hayden's work has been one of the most persistent forces moving poetry in the direction of the post-traditional.

Notes

1. Clearly, the significance of the Festival's location was not lost on its organizers or its participants. The first Festival had been held in 1956 at the Sorbonne - as Vaillant notes, "the center of French scholarship" - and the second in 1959 in Rome, "The Capital of Christian Europe" (322).

2. As Fetrow points out, it was the Grand Prix, more than any previous attention to Hayden's work, that seems to have inspired the four reviews of his Selected Poems in the fall of 1966. The Selected Poems was the first American publication of one of Hayden's books since 1948 (24-25).

3. Rosey Pool, a member of the "Grand Jury" for Hayden's Grand Prix and for many years the leading advocate of his poetry, proclaimed that "At Dakar the words 'Negro' and 'Negritude,' Negroness, took on new meaning and dignity" (42-43). She also used the example of Hayden to invest "negritude," in particular, with unusually extended, personal, and religious overtones: "In light half-nightmare and half-vision he speaks of the face of Baha'u'llah, prophet of the Baha'i faith, in whose eyes Hayden sees the suffering of the men and women who died at Dachau and Buchenwald for their specific Negritude" (43). In his keynote address at the Fisk Conference, Saunders Redding was more upbeat: He drew loud applause by referring to "negritude" as a "relatively inexplicable mystique" (Llorens 55).

4. In the introduction to their recent anthology Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep, Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton suggest that the very similar question "Is a poet first a poet, or first a black?" is "an underlying, if often unspoken, theme of African American poetry since 1945" (1). It is also worth noting that Hayden's position at the Fisk Conference was certainly nothing new, echoing W. E. B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk, the conclusion of Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," and several earlier arguments within the negritude movement. Like many recent literary critics - including the Marxists Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and Terry Eagleton - Hayden thought that some recognition of "culture's limited but significant autonomy within its own sphere" (Graff 155) was true to his own experience and, more importantly, one key to any effective position for poetry within a movement for social change.

5. More than a decade later, in his 1978 address at the Library of Congress, Hayden would respond to this particular comment. At one point in a dialogue between "the Poet" and "the Inquisitor" (a figure "more like Checkov's Black Monk than anything else"), the Poet rebukes his adversary with the phrase "As if you give a tinker's damn about poetry" (Collected Prose 4, 15).

6. The three book-length studies of Hayden, each of which begins with a biographical overview and then proceeds to critical analysis of his poetry, are typical in this regard, though they vary in their estimation of the degree to which the events of 1966 would ultimately shape Hayden's career. Fred M. Fetrow accurately describes the changes in Hayden's critical reception following the International Prize and the Fisk Conference. Pontheolla Williams uses Hayden's response to the conference - his rejection of Black Nationalism and his continued determination not to be bound by any kind of "Black Aesthetic" - as the central message of her "Biographical Sketch" and as the recurrent theme of her critical analysis. John Hatcher entitles his chapter on Hayden's life in the 1960s "The Crucial Years" and begins the critical portion of his book with an attempt to focus Hayden's career by accounting for his response to "The Problem of a 'Black Aesthetic.'"

7. Interestingly, Julius Lester, a former student of Hayden's at Fisk, attributes Hayden's relative obscurity to his refusal to affiliate not just with Black Cultural Nationalism but with any "school" or "movement" or "cause." "Both races," Lester concludes, "think the black writer is a priest, offering absolution to whites or leading blacks to the holy wars" (5).

8. The notable exception is Robert Stepto, who considers Hayden, Michael Harper, and Jay Wright as three poets who develop "post-modernist expressions" anticipated by the ending of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man ("After Modernism" 471). Also, in his "Introduction" to the Selected Poems of Jay Wright, Stepto suggests that, "from the view of literary history," Hayden's "Middle Passage" might be "the poem behind Wright's art," since it anticipates Wright's attention to "the tangle of black traditions binding the Americas to West Africa" (x). In his "Afterword" to the same volume, Harold Bloom echoes Stepto's observation but with, as in all of his writing, a less historically grounded sense of traditions (194-95).

9. Vaillant mentions that there were rumors at the Dakar conference that "black American radicals had been denied entrance" (323).

10. A general idea of the academic consensus on the dimensions of negritude, at about the time of the Dakar conference, is provided by Lilyan Kesteloot's rather conservative survey, described in chapters 21 and 22 of her Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude (298-332).

11. An important early document, in this regard, is Hayden's 1948 "manifesto" for the Counterpoise Series, a series for which he also edited several books of poetry and fiction (Collected Prose 41-42).

12. See the essays by Kutzinski, Davis, and Wright.

13. Of Hayden's critics, Williams is the most aware of the many similarities between "Middle Passage" and "The Waste Land," but her commentary assumes throughout that Hayden is borrowing various elements of "technique" - especially "the technique of fragmentation" (79) - from Eliot, without ever suggesting that Hayden saw any limitations in Eliot's poem or its social implications. Hatcher does not consider Eliot in his reading of "Middle Passage," but in the later stages of his study he, too, repeatedly refers to Eliot as a kind of exemplary model. Davis, in his seminal essay, merely mentions that Hayden's echo of Ariel's song had a "precedent" in "The Waste Land" (258).

14. This merger in Eliot's early poetry of philosophical solipsism and psychosis, which often leads to the collapse of cultural criticism into the psychic projections of the poem's speaker, has become much clearer with the recent publication of Eliot's early manuscripts in Inventions of the March Hare, edited by Christopher Ricks. In a previously unpublished passage from an early draft of "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock," for instance, Prufrock nearly exhausts himself in an effort to get to the window of his room. Once there, he listens to his "Madness singing," or perhaps he witnesses the end of the world (43).

15. Hayden uses a similar strategy in "Night, Death, Mississippi," in which a later episode in American racism is described through the voice of one of its villains - an old man who, as his son is out taking part in a lynching, looks back with a nearly sexual excitement to the times when he too could join in the torture and killing.

16. For a discussion of some of the possible relationships between an understanding of historical contingency and the ability "to achieve certain moral consequences in light of effective strategies and tactics," see Cornel West's criticism of Richard Rorty in The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (209). Like West, I am trying to draw upon some of the implications of Rorty's neopragmatism while avoiding Rorty's tendency, seen most obviously in his recent Language, Contingency, Solidarity, to collapse contingency - of language, of self, of community - into mere arbitrariness.

17. This sense of a contemporary African American poetic tradition overlaps with that of Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep, in which Harper and Walton view Hayden's "work and career" as "a kind of signpost in sensibility" (3) and begin their anthology with a selection of his poetry. Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep takes its title from one in a series of "words and phrases remembered from childhood and youth" that Hayden once collected as "part of the design of a new series of poems." The fuller version is "Every shut-eye ain't sleep and every goodbye ain't gone" (Collected Prose 22).

Works Cited

Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Random, 1976.

Baker, Houston. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Barber, John Warner. A History of the Amistad Captives. 1840. New York: Arno P, 1969.

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Brian Conniff is Associate Professor of English at the University of Dayton. He is currently completing a book on W. H. Auden.