Collected Poems - Softcover

Hayden, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0871406799 ISBN 13: 9780871406798

Publisher: Liveright, 2013

Synopsis

An exquisite body of work celebrating the centennial of one of the most important African-American poets of the twentieth century.

Robert Hayden was one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century. He left behind an exquisite body of work, collected in this definitive edition, including A Ballad of Remembrance, Words in the Mourning Time, The Night-Blooming Cereus, Angle of Ascent, and American Journal, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Also included is an introduction by American poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, as well as an afterword by Arnold Rampersad that provides a critical and historical context. In Hayden’s work the actualities of history and culture became the launching places for flights of imagination and intelligence. His voice―characterized by musical diction and an exquisite feeling for the formality of pattern―is a seminal one in American life and literature.

About this title

About the Authors

Robert Hayden received numerous awards including a Hopwood Award, the Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, and the Russell Loines Award for distinguished poetic achievement from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Frederick Glaysher studied writing under a private tutorial with Robert Hayden at the University of Michigan, from which he holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, the latter in English. The author and editor of several works, he edited Hayden’s Collected Prose as well as the Collected Poems. Robert Hayden is a character in Glaysher’s recently published epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, partly set on the moon, at the landing site of Apollo 11.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is the author of three books of poetry, including the best-selling Felon. He is a poet, lawyer, and the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his dog.

Arnold Rampersad (Ph.D. Harvard) is the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at Stanford University. He is co-editor (with Deborah E. McDowell) of Slavery and the Literary Imagination, and editor of the definitive Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. He is the author of the two-volume biography The Life of Langston Hughes, Jackie Robinson: A Biography, and co-author (with Arthur Ashe) of Days of Grace: A Memoir. He is also editor of “The Harlem Renaissance.”

Reviews

Published in honor of the centenary of Hayden’s birth, this luminescent volume reaffirms the beauty and power of his poetry, from his 1962 collection, A Ballad of Remembrance, to American Journal, the last volume published before his death in 1980. As esteemed critic and biographer Arnold Rampersad (Ralph Ellison, 2007) writes in his afterword, Hayden gravitated to books as a poor foster child in Detroit, hampered by and bullied for his severe myopia. Initially inspired by Countee Cullen, he studied with Auden, and those two mentors represent the primary forces in Hayden’s work: his profound soundings of African American history, his passion for the English language, and what Rampersad describes as his “transracial philosophy.” Hayden addresses slavery with ringing empathy and protest in “Middle Passage” and “Runagate, Runagate,” examines black stereotypes with poignant sharpness in “Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves,” and pays tribute to Malcolm X. Hayden also writes flashing, sinuous, and spiritual lyrics about nature and views Americans from an extraterrestrial’s investigative perspective. An enlightening and exciting reclamation of an essential American poet of suffering and radiance. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0871406799
• ISBN 13: 9780871406798
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Glaysher Frederick