Reading the Middle Generation Anew: Culture, Community, and Form in Twentieth-Century American Poetry

6 Resistance, Sacrifice, and Historicity in the Elegies of Robert Hayden

6 Resistance,Sacrifice,andHistoricity intheElegiesofRobertHayden W. Scott Howard I I listen for the sounds of cannon, cries vibrating still upon the air, timeless echoes in echoic time— imagine how they circle out and out —Robert Hayden, “On Lookout Mountain” Robert Hayden is best known for his poems, such as “Middle Passage,” that draw upon African American history and link vivid scenes of brutality to an ongoing struggle for a greater humanity that might eclipse boundaries of race, class, gender, religion, and politics.1 During the late sixties, of course, Hayden was castigated by Melvin Tolson, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, and other adherents of Ron Karenga’s “black cultural nationalism ” precisely because of those so-called apolitical, antihistoricist, high modernist, and humanistic values.2 Karenga declared 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.”3 As Pontheolla Williams reflects, however, Hayden’s “refusal to be categorized as a black poet was not a rejection of his biological inheritance or the black struggle but 134 | .   was rather a refusal to be restricted in subject matter to ‘race’ or to be identified with . . . jingoism and propagandistic didacticism” (P. Williams, 31).4 Hayden’s repudiation of what has come to be called identity politics should be seen (then and now) as a passionate defense of the literary aesthetic : poetry fashions a figural reality engendered (but not contained) by the political and the historical.5 Despite these prevalent characteristics in the poet’s works, the pivotal role of both figural historicity and sacrificial violence in Hayden’s elegies and elegiac texts has not yet been addressed by critics and scholars.6 This chapter accordingly advances a study of Robert Hayden’s elegies as vehicles for the poet’s historical imagination. In order to define more precisely that working context of analysis, I wish to make a distinction between three key terms already invoked by these opening paragraphs: history, figural historicity, and historical imagination. Hayden’s poetry often engages with the matter of historical personages (as in “Frederick Douglass”), historical events (as in “Belsen, Day of Liberation”), and historical documentation (as in “A Letter from Phillis Wheatley”), which together establish his grounding in and commitment to history, strictly defined. History (as such) conditions Hayden’s poems, which, in turn, constitute their own terms of figurative confrontation with the known world in order to form a contiguous reality, or what I will call figural historicity.7 In his landmark challenge to “all evolutionary/progressive styles of thought, not excluding Marxism,” Benedict Anderson observes that “fiction seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.”8 Just as Anderson theorizes relationships between figurative discourse, politics, and nationalism, Hayden’s historical imagination invests concrete personages, events, and documentation with the generative powers of metaphor.9 Hayden’s poetry ultimately celebrates a long-standing notion of praxis, one that bespeaks his humanistic politics and confidence in the artist’s social responsibility as both maker and visionary.10 The elegy and elegiac mode of writing predominate in Hayden’s oeuvre, thereby illustrating a poetics of loss at the heart of this writer’s life and artistic achievement. He was raised in Detroit as a devout Baptist and would have been acutely aware of key books and passages from the Old and New Testaments (such as Isaiah 51:6, 11, 12; and 2 Corinthians 4:18) in which grief is apprehended as a transitory, yet useful, worldly and temporal precondition for the believer’s acceptance of consolation that rests with the everlasting , atemporal joys of heaven.11 However, in the majority of his texts Resistance, Sacrifice, and Historicity in Robert Hayden | 135 about losses both personal and public, Hayden writes against conventional Western mourning practices (that celebrate transcendent spiritual remedies to affliction and suffering) in order to shape his own private grief into an aesthetic form of oppositional cultural work and a linguistic mode of social resistance.12 By transgressing religious, literary, and cultural norms, Hayden ’s elegies brave the world’s intractability, thus articulating the negotiation of loss within a dynamic context of interpersonal, textual, and social transformation. Hayden’s poetics of loss, in this regard, participates in an emerging tradition of the modern Anglo-American elegy, illustrated richly...