Robert Hayden: Modernism and the Afro-American epic mission.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that Robert Hayden is best interpreted as a modernist and that his most achieved works are those that emerge from his attempts to create an Afro-American epic, first with <italic>The Black Spear </italic> (unpublished, 1942), and then with a modern poetic sequence commencing with Middle Passage (1943), and concluding with the revised John Brown (1978). In pursuing this mission, Hayden found that the techniques of high modernism, such as irony, allusion, polyglot expression, cinematic technique, metonymy, and narrative disjunction, were more useful for him than the vernacular poetics of James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown, although he extended the resources of those poetics. The disassociative qualities of modernism helped Hayden register the uniquely disjunctive yet cohesive aspects of Afro-American experience in the Western hemisphere. The fugitive nature of the black population in the New World did not as epic subject parallel the struggle for national consolidation waged by the warrior prince and his clan in classical epics such as the <italic>Aeneid</italic>. Instead, Hayden discerned a millennial pattern in which black leaders would emerge from anonymity to achieve heroic epiphany during crises in American civilization, yet without achieving permanent resolution of the Afro-American predicament. Its terrain is not national and spatial, but moral and millenarian. This vision is also compatible with Hayden's major ideological influences: Baptist fundamentalism, Marxism, and his Baha'i faith. The result is Hayden's creation of the epic of the diaspora, a form subsequently employed by postcolonial poets such as Kamau Brathwaite, Grace Nichols, and Derek Walcott.