African American poet whose formal command, historical reach, and religious seriousness made him, in the judgment of most later readers, the most distinguished African American poet of the mid-20th century — and whose insistence that he be read as a poet, not as a Black poet, put him in quarrel with the Black Arts Movement at the peak of his career. Hayden grew up in the Detroit neighborhood called Paradise Valley in wrenching poverty and in a turbulent foster family; the 1966 poem "Those Winter Sundays" ("What did I know, what did I know / of love's austere and lonely offices?") is the enduring lyric to come out of it.
He taught for decades at Fisk University and later the University of Michigan, studied with W. H. Auden as a graduate student, and in 1940 converted to the Baháʼí faith — a universalist religion whose commitments to the unity of humanity and to historical progress run through all of his mature work. A Ballad of Remembrance (1962) won the grand prize for poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in 1966; the key volumes are Selected Poems (1966), Words in the Mourning Time (1970), and Angle of Ascent (1975).
Hayden's historical poems — "Middle Passage" (the great verse meditation on the slave trade), "Runagate Runagate" (on Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad), "Frederick Douglass" (the sonnet whose close — "when it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful / and terrible thing, needful to man as air, / usable as earth" — is among the most quoted in American poetry), and "Paul Laurence Dunbar" — are the foundation of the argument that history is an authorized subject for African American lyric. He was the first Black Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1976–78), the post now called Poet Laureate.