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Chapter 2 - Robert Hayden, the Black Arts Movement, and the Politics of Aesthetic Distance

from I - Poetry and Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2022

By
Derik Smith
Edited by
Shelly Eversley
Shelly Eversley
Affiliation:
Baruch College, The City University of New York
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Summary

Ready-made histories of 1960s cultural development might easily overlook Robert Hayden. His apparently genteel politics, reflected in commitments to racial cosmopolitanism and substantial reverence for the Western canon, distinguished him from many of the innovators and experimentalists of 1960s Black radical poetry. However, Hayden’s distinctive contributions to the decade played a key role in the evolution of African American poetics. His political aesthetic became an important model for successful Black poets of the later twentieth century. These academic poets, whose professional and intellectual lives were distanced from the economic and cultural exigencies of the Black majority, learned much from Hayden’s theory of aesthetic distance. While a powerful Black aesthetic of the 1960s called for art that appeared to spring from the heart of the Black folk masses, Hayden honed a deeply introspective Black poetics, which contemplated the experiential distance that stretched between the “colleged” poet-speaker and the Black folk world.

Keywords

Black AestheticBlack Arts MovementintellectualismMalcolm XRobert Haydenvernacularwriterly
Type
Chapter
Information
African American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970
Black Art, Politics, and Aesthetics
 , pp. 50 - 73
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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