Poets are artists and therefore very creative people. But their artistic faculty does not - in most cases - conjure out of nothing. Poets are influenced by many different things. Almost all lyricists name some other members of their art who directly or indirectly made an impact on their very own work - who they used as a kind of an idol or who even aroused their interest in poetry. Robert Hayden is no exception. He admits to be influenced by poets such as Keats , Byron, Carl Sandburg, Countee Cullen and more.
Naturally poets are also influenced by their surroundings, namely nature, landscape, history and of course by people, especially by friends and family members. For Hayden, and probably almost all other poets, poems serve as a means of coming to terms with particular situations. Robert Hayden’s upraising was not exactly typical; his parents separated soon after his birth and he was brought up by poor foster-parents. He states that the “greatest discouragement” were the circumstances he lived in: His family neither had money nor education; at the age of forty he had to find out that his foster-parents had never formally adopted him and the worst thing were the “conflicts, the quarrelling, the tensions that kept us most of the time on the edge of some shrill domestic calamity.” (Both McCluskey 138)
This term paper aims at illustrating how Robert Hayden – in his poems - coped with his family background and his position between the people who loved him and who struggled about being loved most in turn. To fully understand the emotions of Robert Hayden and his attitude towards his foster-parents and his mother I will – in the first chapter - provide a depiction of his youth and his relationship between him and his natural parents and foster parents.
I chose to concentrate on three poems; two from the collection A Ballad of Remembrance because they emerged at a point in Hayden’s life where he felt he needed to recall to his past and besides these poems illustrate a portrayal of his foster parents. In the second chapter I will present a description of his foster mother and father on the basis of information taken from these two poems.
The third chapter will, on the basis of the third poem ‘Names’, illustrate Robert Hayden’s identical crisis which emerged from his discovery that he had not been adopted legally.
Finally I will evaluate the information gained from chapters one to three and present a summary of how Robert Hayden coped with his greatest discouragement.
Inhalt
Introduction
1. Robert Hayden and his Family
2. Poems and Portrayals
2.1. Portrayal of Mr. William Hayden
2.1.1. Those winter Sundays
2.2. Portrayal of Mrs. Sue Hayden
2.2.1. The Whipping
3. The question of identity
Conclusion
Bibliography
Printed Works
Introduction
Poets are artists and therefore very creative people. But their artistic faculty does not - in most cases - conjure out of nothing. Poets are influenced by many different things. Almost all lyricists name some other members of their art who directly or indirectly made an impact on their very own work - who they used as a kind of an idol or who even aroused their interest in poetry. Robert Hayden is no exception. He admits to be influenced by poets such as Keats[1], Byron, Carl Sandburg, Countee Cullen[2] and more.
Naturally poets are also influenced by their surroundings, namely nature, landscape, history and of course by people, especially by friends and family members. For Hayden, and probably almost all other poets, poems serve as a means of coming to terms with particular situations. Robert Hayden’s upraising was not exactly typical; his parents separated soon after his birth and he was brought up by poor foster-parents. He states that the “greatest discouragement” were the circumstances he lived in: His family neither had money nor education; at the age of forty he had to find out that his foster-parents had never formally adopted him and the worst thing were the “conflicts, the quarrelling, the tensions that kept us most of the time on the edge of some shrill domestic calamity.” (Both McCluskey 138)
This term paper aims at illustrating how Robert Hayden – in his poems - coped with his family background and his position between the people who loved him and who struggled about being loved most in turn. To fully understand the emotions of Robert Hayden and his attitude towards his foster-parents and his mother I will – in the first chapter - provide a depiction of his youth and his relationship between him and his natural parents and foster parents.
I chose to concentrate on three poems; two from the collection A Ballad of Remembrance because they emerged at a point in Hayden’s life where he felt he needed to recall to his past[3] and besides these poems illustrate a portrayal of his foster parents. In the second chapter I will present a description of his foster mother and father on the basis of information taken from these two poems.
The third chapter will, on the basis of the third poem ‘Names’, illustrate Robert Hayden’s identical crisis which emerged from his discovery that he had not been adopted legally.
Finally I will evaluate the information gained from chapters one to three and present a summary of how Robert Hayden coped with his greatest discouragement.
1. Robert Hayden and his Family
Robert Hayden was born as Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, Michigan on August 4, 1913. His biological parents were Asa and Ruth Sheffey – a black former coal miner from West Virginia and a woman of mixed origins from Pennsylvania, who ran away from home - while still teenager - to join a circus. They divorced yet before Robert’s birth and when Asa disappeared, Ruth decided to leave 18 months-old Robert with a black neighbor couple - William and Sue Ellen Hayden - and went to Buffalo, New York to find work there (Hatcher, 6). So Asa Bundy Sheffey became Robert Earl Hayden.
Sue’s daughter Roxie lived with them and worked as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant (Hayden 1993, 18). The four lived on Beacon Street in a part of Detroit which later ironically became known as Paradise Valley (Greenburg 363). That district was filled with a mixture of cultures. Hayden knew kids of Chinese, “Italian, Jewish, even Southern white” origin (Hayden 1993, 26). Robert Hayden describes the main street of Paradise Valley as a place of “shootings, stabbings, blaring jazz, and a liveliness, a gaiety at once desperate and releasing, at once wicked – Satan’s playground – and good-hearted.”(Hayden 1993, 19) Later, that part of Detroit became a “largely Black ghetto” (Hatcher 5).
Robert Hayden suffered from extreme myopia. This short-sightedness restricted his social development in so far, that he could not take part in every kind of leisure activities, like sports. He was, however, a very intelligent boy and learned to read before entering school and took violin lessons. He had to quit, when his teacher discovered that Robert did not play after the music but simply by hearing it because he couldn’t decipher the music anymore. Due to this handicap – his visual defect - he early began to withdraw into the world of literature (Hayden 1993, 22).
By having described himself as an “old man’s head on a boy’s shoulders” (1993, 22) Robert Hayden may was not only pointing to his intelligence but also made a reference to his myopia. At junior high his teachers told him not to read small prints, which made reading books even more interesting to him, because it now was a forbidden thing to do. It is, as Fetrow puts it: “Hayden’s eyes failed him, yet perhaps also “saved” him for something more important.”(3)
The Hayden’s home did not offer many books, so Robert often frequented the public library of Detroit and there made friends with the librarian Marie Alice Hanson to whom he later dedicated the collection Words in the Mourning Time. Marie Alice knew about Robert’s fascination for poetry and therefore laid aside new books which might have interested him. She even sometimes paid the fees when Robert overran the due date. (Hatcher 8)
William Hayden had worked as a coal miner and laborer and later drove a coal wagon. A simple man like him could not understand why his foster son was so different from other boys of that age. William Hayden would have considered sports as a typical activity for young boys and regarded Robert’s obsession with books as an “inability to express his masculinity” (Hatcher 5). Understandably Robert’s relationship to his father was a rather tense one. A boy who escaped “from domestic turmoil and the ghetto grind in imaginative literature of diverse quality and genre” (Fetrow 3) and thereby fled into the fantastic, but theoretic world of books could never be understood by a father who had always led a practical life with the sole aim to work and provide for his family. Nevertheless William often told Robert he should “get something in [his] head and they can’t take it away from [him].” (Hayden 1993, 21) He wanted his foster son to lead a better, more comfortable life than himself. Robert’s foster parents raised him as if he were their very own son, yet they provided “a strong dose of old-fashioned, guilt inducing, hell-and damnation religion, [and] his foster mother often reminded him of her charity, his ingratitude, and his natural mother’ unworthiness”. (Fetrow 2)
Sue Ellen Hayden was a strict mother, who – as her husband - couldn’t deal with the poetic interest of her foster son. Before having married William Hayden, she had been the wife of Jim Barlow. She obviously never forgot her first husband who had died and let her family feel the loss also physically. Sue Ellen did not only suffer emotionally but also from physical pain. Hatcher (8) explains that Robert took his foster mother to a “neighborhood conjurer-healer-medium” to free her from her ache so that she’d be “less irritable and less inclined to take out her own misery on him”. She nevertheless loved Robert affectionately (Greenburg 364) and told him stories about her life in the south and her experiences in the post-civil war times, which provided a lot of background for his poetry. (Williams 5)
Robert’s natural parents did not disappear completely from Robert’s life. When he met Asa Sheffey[4], his father would try to impress little Robert with gifts and later start to drink and criticize his ex-wife – Robert’s natural mother, who was adored by her son. Robert Hayden later states “he simply could never develop a genuine feeling of love” (Williams 4) for his natural father.
Ruth Sheffey was uneducated as Robert’s foster parents were as well. She nevertheless found a way to support her son’s ambition to become a poet and Robert Hayden states that “part of his literary inspiration […] came from his mother.” (Hatcher 7) Ruth Sheffey often visited Robert, even stayed there for a while and took Robert to Buffalo to spent time with him at her place.
The frequent presence of Ruth Sheffey at the Hayden house led to a certain tension. Sue Ellen Hayden, who already had difficulties to bear her own life, felt she had to compete about the love of her foster-son. Fetrow puts it as follows:
“The proximity of emotionally competitive parent figures produced divisions of love, loyalty, and resentment that took an enormous psychological toll on the boy as he tried to cope with the “chronic angers“ of that household. Of those diverse permutations of “divide and antagonize,” Hayden recalled mainly the conflicts between foster and natural mother for his affection, and the “ganging up” of the three women against the quietly enduring and often unappreciated father figure in an essentially matriarchal “mini-society”. (2)
Robert Hayden states that he could cope with the poor circumstances and the ghetto he was living in, but the permanent struggle about loving and being loved hurt him deeply. “Even in his advanced years, Hayden recalled his youth with ambivalence, finding comfort in memories of shared love. Yet almost visibly flinching in remembered response to the psychic trauma of his “unusual” family life.” (Fetrow 3)
In 1953 - Robert Hayden had meanwhile gone to university[5], married and published several poems – he faced a blatant crisis. His foster parents had already died when he had to discover that they had never formally adopted him and that his name was actually still Asa Bundy Sheffey. Robert Earl Hayden did legally not exist.[6] “He knew that the good old days in the Detroit slums had never been good.” (Hayden 1993, 20)
[...]
[1] “But Keats I loved more that the others.” (McCluskey 1993,131)
[2] McCluskey 1993,132 & Hayden 1993,23
[3] “[…]during the fifties people of my generation were aware that we reached a midpoint, and we all no doubt constrained to look back, to see how far we’d come, maybe to see ourselves in retrospect.” When A Ballad of Remembrance was published in 1966, Hayden was 53.
[4] The sources provide different information about the number of Robert Hayden’s meetings with his natural father: “But the brief encounter with his natural father was less successful.” (Hatcher 1984,6) “Asa Sheffey […] sometimes came from Gary […] to visit his son.” (Williams 1987,4) They nevertheless conform about the course of events during the encounter(s).
[5] At that time William Hayden was unemployed and the family was forced to live on welfare. One day a caseworker took notice of Robert while he was standing in the line for welfare reading a collection of poems from Langston Hughes. They got into conversation and eventually Robert told her, that one day he would become a poet. The caseworker obviously believed in his talent, because due to her contacts Robert got a scholarship and started to study.
[6] “You don’t exist – at least / not legally, the lawyer said. / As ghost, double, alter ego then?” (lines 16-18 from “Names”, see chapter 3)
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