Robert Hayden's Detroit Blues Elegies

In the 1930s, the young Robert Hayden began to write poems set in his neighborhood, Detroit's Paradise Valley. Decades later, the mature artist, long removed from the "vanished rooms" and "dead streets" of his youth, returned to them in his poetry. Paradise Valley, which, in the 1950s, was sacrificed to urban renewal, increasingly became the subject and not merely the setting for his poems. "By then," he said, he had "gained enough psychic or emotional distance" to compose these poems based on his youth (Prose 139), and, though they appeared sporadically, he saw them as part of a group. ¹ In them, he filtered his recollections through the Afro-American and European artistic traditions in which he schooled himself. Hayden applied the principles of two such traditions--the blues and the elegy--to the concrete circumstances of Afro-Americans in Paradise Valley.

Although the blues and the elegy both offer strategies for coping with adversity, elegies usually consider general, universal topics: death, ruin, the nature of change itself, whereas blues normally react to immediate and specific changes in life: loss of a lover, a job, money; movement from one locale to another. The elegist usually writes to make sense of an irrevocable loss, whereas the blues artist often includes in the work a way to reverse the condition or at least mollify the sadness. As a young poet, Hayden wrote blues poems about Depression-era Detroit. As he matured, he concentrated more on the elegiac, although the blues experience remains. The Detroit poems of his later career are elegies in their expression of loss over a vanished place and absent people and blues in their resurrection of the Paradise Valley experience. They examine the miseries and coping strategies of long-gone Paradise Valley people.

Late in life Hayden commented that "the good old days in the Detroit slums had never been good" (Prose 20), but these poems do not merely bemoan the wretchedness of urban existence. Inherent in the blues and elegy--and in Hayden's use of them--is a protest against injustice, violence, and death itself. City life provides resources to confront these forces. Hayden's integrative and communitarian impulses led him to appreciate the "beauty," "gentleness," "vividness of life," and "intensity of being" of Paradise Valley, as well as its "violence and ugliness and cruelty." He recalled the "people who retained . . . a sheltering spiritual beauty and dignity . . . despite sordid and disheartening circumstances" (Prose 141). ² While disdaining much that is called "protest poetry," Hayden disagreed with W.H. Auden, his mentor, about what poems can accomplish, writing that "poetry does make something happen" and that "to be a poet . . . is to care passionately about justice and one's fellow beings" (Prose 9, 11).

Hayden's Detroit poems fit into the contexts of urban literature and Afro-American urban literature. Although the city they present is a fallen habitat of poverty, crime, and sin, it is also the locus for a potentially harmonious and just community. Charles Scruggs writes that, even when seeming least likely, "the idea of a visionary city is a durable and ongoing tradition within black urban literature." He argues further:

The city as a symbol of community, of civilization, of home--this image lies beneath the city of brute fact in which blacks in the twentieth century have had to live. This kernel has never been lost. It is one of the aspirations expressed in an ongoing dialogue that the Afro-American community has with itself, a dialogue that sets a city of the imagination, the city that one wants, against the empirical reality of the city that one has. (4-5)

Hayden's urban poetry is visionary in this sense. His Baha'i belief, in his words, "in the fundamental oneness of all races, the essential oneness of mankind, . . . [and] the vision of world unity" strongly influences his mature poetry (Prose 200). To Hayden, the poet's role "is to affirm the humane, the universal, the potentially divine in...