Robert Hayden

Born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, Michigan, Robert Hayden (1913–1980) attended Detroit City College (now Wayne State University) before studying under W. H. Auden (p. 1169) in the graduate English program at the University of Michigan. In 1976, Hayden was appointed consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a post that was the forerunner to that of poet laureate. His first volume, Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), took its voice from the Harlem Renaissance. Later work continued to garner critical praise, including Hayden’s epic poem on the Amistad mutiny, “Middle Passage,” and A Ballad of Remembrance (1962).

Frederick Douglass

This poem first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1947.

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,

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reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,

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this man, superb in love and logic, this man

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

(1947)