Robert Hayden's Impact On African American Poetry

Robert Hayden intends to us a figure such as Frederick Douglass to reflect the struggles of African American and reach readers of all demographics. Poetry has the ability to be both political and to transcend into spirituality. This makes poetry a medium that is versatile in its ability to discuss different topics. While a reader may see a beautiful rose sprouting from the ground, another may see the thorns ready to puncture the outstretched hand. African American culture has found freedom in poetry. Each line of an African American poem, carries behind it the many years of pain through the ages of slavery and racial segregation. Frederick Douglass by Robert Hayden and The Explorer by Gwendolyn Brooks are poems that treat two different critical lenses consisting of a social perspective that reflects the struggles of African Americans and an archetypal perspective that expresses universal human longings.

Robert Hayden titled his poem after one of the most influential African American abolitionist and social reformers, Frederick Douglass. The use of the title foreshadows the main theme of the treatment of African American people in society. Robert Hayden poetically articulates, “this Negro beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien.” Frederick Douglass becomes an exemplar of the beaten down and segregated African American. Hayden uses a social perspective to reflect the struggles of all African Americans through the biography of Frederick Douglass. The treatment Douglass received in the nineteenth century when placed against the treatment of American Americans in the mid-twentieth century is very similar. Hayden is able to connect the old to new and place in the light the evolution of social norms, questioning if society is still racially