Robert Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, Michigan on August 4, 1913. His parents were Asa Sheffey, a coal miner, and Ruth Sheffey, born Gladys Finn. His mother was of racially mixed ancestry. His parent’s marriage was unsuccessful and they parted before he was born. Ruth gave Asa Bundy Sheffey over to William and Sue Ellen Hayden for them to raise him. It was at that time that he received his current name of Robert Hayden. Robert kept in contact with his natural mother. He visited his once in Gary, India, but he got mad at his father for attacking the mother that he loved so well.
There was tension between William Hayden and Robert. Sue Ellen occasionally took out her frustrations on Robert. It was from these experiences that he wrote his poems “The Whipping” and “Those Winter Sundays.” Robert was in a constant tug of war between his foster parents and his natural mother. Robert eventually found out that he was never formally adopted and that his given and still legal name was Asa Bundy Sheffey. Hayden lived in a racially mixed neighborhood until his late teens. His playmates included Jewish and Italian children. It was from these experiences that he wrote “The Rabbi” and “ Elegies for Paradise Valley.”
Hayden’s severe nearsightedness got him sent to Northern High School, which was a predominately white school. He discovered modern poetry at age sixteen, and he graduated high school in 1930. Hayden then enrolled in Detroit City College, now Wayne State University, in 1932 and majored in Spanish. He left in 1936 on credit short of graduation. Hayden began graduate studies at the University of Michigan in 1938.
Hayden married Erma Inez Morris in June of 1938. She was a concert pianist and music teacher. They had their only child, Maia, on October 5, 1942. In 1943, Robert converted to the Bahá’I Faith after much influence from his wife.
Hayden worked odd jobs such as typing, clerking in a grocery store, and issuing policy slips for an illegal numbers game while taking post graduated classes. He was employed for several years by the Work Progress Administration, a government employment program for artists. He did research for the WPA into black history and Folklore. He left the WPA and began writing for the Michigan Chronicle. Hayden was a teaching assistant at the University of Michigan from 1944 to 1946. In 1946, Hayden obtained an assistant professorship in English at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee for twenty-three years. He resigned in 1969 and became a professor of English at the University of Michigan for the rest of his life.
In 1931, Abbot’s Monthly accepted Hayden’s “Africa,” which was a response to Countee Cullen’s “Heritage.” “Autumnal” was included in American Stuff, an anthology of work by WPA writers in 1937. Hayden’s “Heartshape in the Dust” was published in 1940. “O Daedalus, Fly Away Home” was, in 1943, published in Poetry magazine. In 1946, Hayden published his two most famous poems, “Middle Passage” and “Frederic Douglass.” In 1966, Hayden published Selected Poems.
Hayden won Jule and Avery Hopwood Prize for Poetry in 1942 and 1944. He, in 1966, won Grand Prix de la Poesie at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal and was named Poet Laureate of Senegal. In 1975, he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. For this he received an award of $10,000. Hayden was also appointed a two-year term as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress in 1975. He was the first African-American to hold this position. He was so well liked that he was appointed to a second two-year term. In January of 1980, Hayden was among a group of American poets honored by President Jimmy Carter in a White House ceremony. On February 24, 1980, the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan presented “A Tribute to Robert Hayden.” Hayden was unable to attend the ceremony and died the next day at the age of sixty-six.
I believe Addison Wesley Longman said it well when he said, “Throughout decades of neglect and scorn, [Hayden] clung steadfastly to his artistic and human values, producing a body of work whose artistry and emotional richness placed him or very near the front rank of an especially talented generation of American poets.”
