Just a few months after the English Department honored Hayden, in January of 2023 the Ann Arbor city council designated the house of Hayden and his wife Erma, famed in her own right as a concert pianist, as a “Historic District.” Their home at 1201 Gardner Ave. in Ann Arbor’s Lower Burns Park “was highly segregated” in the 1960s when the couple moved in (Lyu).

“Hayden was generally recognized as one of the country’s leading poets” by the time he was honored as poet laureate, according to the Poetry Foundation. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature adds that he was, “acclaimed” as the “‘People's Poet’ early in his career” but was criticized in the 1960s for “for refusing to call himself a ‘Negro poet,’” instead wanting to be known as an “American poet” (Buck).

“History… has haunted Robert Hayden from the beginning of his career as a poet,” according to Charles. T. Davis, a noted influential literary critic and scholar. Hayden “wrote some of the most powerful ‘black history’ poems in the English language” (Buck). “The historical basis for much of Hayden’s poetry stemmed from his extensive study of American and African American history. Beginning in the 1930s, when he researched Black history for the Federal Writers’ Project in his native Detroit,” according to the Poetry Foundation. 

Hayden was raised in Detroit “slum called Paradise Valley” by foster parents, as his biological parents “separated soon after his birth,” according to his biography in the Database of Twentieth Century American Poetry. His mother Ruth was “poor and itinerant” and unable to care for him, according to AfricanAmericanPoetry.org, so she moved to Buffalo entrusting her neighbors to care for and raise her son (Tom Stanton). Hayden’s extreme nearsightedness is what turned him to books as a child, according to the Poetry Foundation. His eyesight was so poor, he attended a special high school for students with sight issues in Detroit (Buck). 

Robert Hayden is not the given name of the poet, but rather the name he came to be known as. Born Asa Bundy Sheffey, his foster parents Sue Ellen Westerfield and William Hayden called him Robert Hayden, but never legally changed his name, according to AfricanAmericanPoetry.org. That information was a surprise to Hayden, who didn’t find that out until he was 27 (Buck). “In 1953, Robert was shocked to discover that the Haydens had never legally adopted him, contrary to their claim, and that he was really Asa Sheffey,” according to the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Nonetheless, his adoptive father William “Pa” Hayden “is immortalized in one of Robert's most anthologized poems, ‘Those Winter Sundays’” (Buck). He also wrote the poem “The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield” to honor the stories his adoptive mother told him about “African American folktales and… Reconstruction-era racial atrocities, based on her own experiences as a maid working on Ohio River steamships” (“Robert Hayden”).

Apropos for the poet, the first name Robert means “bright fame,” coming “from the Germanic name Hrodebert,” according to BehindTheName.com. The surname Hayden is an Anglicized version of the Gaelic word éideadh, meaning “clothes armor,” according to Ancestry.com, which says the name could also come from the Old English words hēg (meaning “hay”) or (ge)hæg (meaning “fence enclosure”) plus dūn (meaning “hill”) or denu (meaning “valley”). 

Listen to Hayden read one of his most anthologized poems, “Those Winter Sundays” on YouTube. You can listen to Hayden read other work and discuss poetry on the Library of Congress’ website.