Slave Rebellion
As in, for instance, his poetry devoted to the rebellious slaves. Some of the best work of Hayden’s career is steeped in the history of slaves, former slaves and freed blacks helping slaves to find their way to freedom. Taking any single one of these poems out context makes for a deeply pleasurable reading experience—and a terrific history lesson in works like “The Ballad of Nat Turner” and “Middle Passage”—but to fully appreciate the handling of slavery as a thematic thread running through Hayden’s career, it behooves a reader to consider them as a whole in a sort of uncollected volume. Individual poems range from the formal sonnet construction of “Frederick Douglass” that reflects its more detached treatment of the subject matter to the far more experimental construction of “Runagate Runagate” which combines with an abundance of imagery to recreate the breathless frenzy of a desperate escape toward freedom along the Underground Railroad. When the four predominant examples of slave rebellion verse is combined with other examples, however, the effect is the revelation of intent: the rebellion passes from one poem to the next because the dream of Douglass has yet to be realized. The rebellion continues and so cannot be relegated to just a single poem as an expression of theme.
Autobiographical Verse
Hayden can rightly be considered a poet who writes verse that is informed by a deep appreciation of his past which explores intensely personal moments assumed to be based on real incidents. At the same time as this is true, it must be noted that in no way can Hayden be considered anything close to a confessional poet. One of Hayden’s most well-known poems is instructional in the manner in which he chooses to present events and memories which are to be assumed as factual on some level:
The old woman across the way
is whipping the boy again
and shouting to the neighborhood
her goodness and his wrongs.
The third person detachment here of the speaker describing an event which seems to be unconnected to him personally and of which he is mere observer belies the subtle shift in perspective which occurs midway through in which the speaker is now recalling his own childhood victimization of such punishment; a memory based on the poet’s own actual history. This is Hayden’s preferred approach to inviting readers into his poems which are not external accounts of rebellion by historical figures but his own accounts of rebellion against childhood oppression and authority. Whether the oppression is merely perceived as a result of childish ignorance such as his most famous poem exploring this theme—“Those Winter Sundays”—or a painful revelation of genuine authoritarian oppression such as “The Whipping,” Hayden does engage the first-person confessional approach of ripping himself open to full, unblemished exposure, but instead usually introduces a dual-narrative concept that allows the reader to see the poet as both the child and the adult looking back.
Social Protest
Strongly guided by the paradigmatic Harlem Renaissance template and infused with his own personal embrace of a sort of semi-official Marxist ideology, the very first collection of Hayden’s verse, Heart-Shape in the Dust, was dominated by themes of social protest. A reading of these early poems starkly reveal the sharp turn his verse was to take almost immediately as this is clearly the poetry of a man of the 1930’s: an urgent invocation to activism deeply embedded within a political awareness that author himself would later admit was only half-formed. Hayden would later reject both the function and thematic display which shaped his first collection as his interest in politics as an overt ideological subject waned and dissipated into historical interests to be pursued more subtly as his technique matured and developed into a more strictly formalist symbolist poet. Nevertheless, social protest remains a thematic element always present at some level in much of Hayden's most memorable works.