"Something patterned, wild, and free": Robert Hayden's angles of descent and the democratic unconscious

[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)

The 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 historical 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 historical crisis" (489). He follows with brilliant readings which show how Hayden's historical 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 "cultural" 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 historical 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.

The 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. Hayden's approach can be understood in relation to Freud's assertion that, because "urges with contrary aims exist side by side in the unconscious," its structure "embraces mutually incompatible details" (44). For many modernists, this structure threatened to unleash dangerously anti-social and irrational impulses which might destroy the rational structures of Western civilization. For Hayden and others confined by segregation, the threats can be understood as potentially liberating cultural/political advances. The relationship between images within and between Hayden's poems invokes the fluid structure of psychic depth to re-see the world and meditate on the limitations of, and possibilities beyond, racial, cultural, and existential oppositions in American life.

The sources of Hayden's vision are unusually complex. In From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robert Hayden, John Hatcher suggests that Hayden's modernism has three principal ingredients: W. H. Auden's modernist technique, the Baha'i religion's approach to modernity, and Hayden's own intimately distant creative approach. In his "Introduction" to Hayden's Collected Poems, Arnold Rampersad notes that Auden saw "Marxism and ultranationalism as, in different ways, inimical to the flourishing of art.... [thus, he] proposed a modernist poetry of technical and meditative complexity, in which judicious erudition and imagination... were vital elements" (xviii). In "A 'Romantic Realist,"' Hayden cryptically described his graduate study with Auden as "a strategic experience in my life" (118). Hayden's non-ideological, or anti-dogmatic, approach to composition was not solely the result of Auden's influence. Recalling experiences before he'd met Auden in his third-person autobiographical sketch "From The Life ," Hayden writes that, before he went to graduate school, "venturing to read his poems for the members of the [Detroit] John Reed Club, he was scathingly criticized for his lack of political awareness. And he was often accused of being too much the individualist and not willing to submit to ideology" (25). As Hatcher notes, in classes, speeches, and interviews, Hayden often repeated "Auden's notion of poetry as a process of solving for the unknown.... 'In poetry you are really solving x, looking for the unknown quantity. You are trying to say what cannot be said any other way--and, in some poems, you are trying to say what cannot be said at all'" (70). While saying the impossible implies an improvisational approach to composition, Hayden was a relentless and meticulous reviser. Hatcher quotes a 1976 interview in which Hayden shows his unapologetic attitude toward the rigors of poetic craft:" 'If I have a missionary zeal about anything, it is this. Technique is very important to me. I've not spent my life as a poet just to put words together any old way' (89).