Frederick Douglass

Robert Hayden’s commemorative poem “Frederick Douglass” (1947) originally appeared in The Atlantic magazine. The poem is a panegyric, which is a specialized form offering high praise for someone deemed exemplary. Hayden uses the form to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s death, during what would become historically the first stirrings in the nearly three-decades-long struggle for civil rights for African Americans. In celebrating the memory of the courageous 19th-century Black abolitionist and fiery orator, whose incendiary rhetoric decrying the immorality of slavery helped fuel the growing Northern movement against slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War, Hayden’s poem actually resists being a commemorative poem. Such poems are traditionally past tense. The poem dismisses the value of such commemorations as hopelessly myopic and self-congratulatory. Indeed, the point of the poem is that nearly a century later Douglass’s work is barely begun.

Hayden argues that Douglass’s fullest legacy as a passionate freedom fighter will be realized not in poems or in statues in his honor but only when freedom is part of the very fiber of every American—of humanity itself. In this vision of humanity’s freedom, Hayden fuses two elements critical to his vision: the urgent call for Black civil rights against white America’s institutionalized racism in the post-war era and the generous vision of the Baha’i faith that Hayden himself embraced in the mid-1940s. Among its foundational concepts is Baha’i’s perception of humanity itself as a single grand organism, each person yearning to be free of the limits of hate and intolerance and to become part of a true cosmic oneness.

Poet Biography

Born Asa Bundy Sheffey on 4 August 1913, Robert Hayden grew up in Detroit’s Paradise Valley, then one of the most impoverished Black neighborhoods in the city’s Black district, known as Black Bottom. The neighborhoods were the result of a generation of Black workers who migrated from the South during the Depression looking for employment opportunities in Northern cities. Hayden’s neighborhood was known for its gambling establishments, dangerous speakeasies, and sex work. Hayden’s parents separated before he was born, and he was in and out of the city’s overworked and underfunded foster care system; for more than 10 years, he was raised by neighbors, a volatile and often violent Black couple. Often beaten, Hayden himself became the object of his foster mother’s sexual attention. As an adolescent, Hayden had few friends, and because he was short for his age and wore thick glasses, he never participated in sports (the neighborhood hero at the time was heavyweight champion Joe Louis). He was also the target of much bullying. Books, particularly the free verse poetry of Walt Whitman and the lyricism of Langston Hughes, offered him refuge. By the age of 15, Hayden knew he wanted to be a poet.

In 1933, Hayden briefly attended Detroit City College (now Wayne State University) as a literature major. In the midst of the Depression, Hayden could not afford to stay in school. Rather, from 1936-1940, he worked in the government-sponsored organization known as the Federal Writers’ Project, which provided meaningful work in the public sector for aspiring writers, academics, and artists as well as librarians and journalists. In that capacity, Hayden studied African American history in the Deep South, particularly the antebellum era of the Underground Railroad. During this time, Hayden published his first volume of poetry, Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940). That same year, he married Erma Morris, a schoolteacher trained as a classical pianist, who was instrumental in introducing Hayden to the Baha’i faith, a mystical religion that envisions the ultimate unification of humanity and all religions, in fellowship, love, and trust as the sole goal of creation.

Despite lacking a Bachelor’s degree, on the strength of his published poetry, Hayden, then 28, was accepted for graduate work at the University of Michigan. Over the next four years, under the guidance of British poet W. H. Auden, then the university’s Poet in Residence, Hayden experimented with increasingly dense and complex poetic lines. It was during this time that Hayden published “Frederick Douglass,” itself a carefully skewed sonnet.

After completing his graduate work at Ann Arbor and a brief stint teaching there, Hayden accepted a professorship at Nashville’s Fisk University, one of America’s prestigious Historically Black Universities. Hayden would remain for more than 20 years before returning to Ann Arbor to end his long teaching career.

Hayden published nine volumes of poetry in his lifetime, recognized as much for his exploration of Black identity in a changing America as for his willingness to push poetic form by crafting poems that reflected his complex conceptions of the functions of rhythm and rhyme. Hayden was always candid in essays and interviews on how he resisted identifying himself as a Black poet, finding the term narrow and limiting. In 1976, the Bicentennial year, Hayden accepted the two-year appointment as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the first Black poet to hold this position, which would later become the Poet Laureateship. On February 25, 1980, Hayden died of heart failure in Ann Arbor. He was just 66. His modest marker in Ann Arbor’s Fairview Cemetery reads, “This man superb in love and logic,” a line taken from “Frederick Douglass.

Poem Text

Hayden, Robert. “Frederick Douglass.” 1947. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The title sets up the expectation of a commemorative poem, known as a panegyric, about abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). Yet this poem focuses not so much on the historic figure but rather on the culture to which the poet now belongs. Written nearly a century after the Civil War, “Frederick Douglass” suggests that war left undone its most important imperative: freedom.

The poem opens with a sense of quiet expectation and unflagging optimism: “When it is finally ours, this freedom” (Line 1). The word “finally,” although it suggests that history moves slowly, affirms that it—freedom—will happen.

The speaker sets up five conditions, each built around the word “when.” That repetition sets up a powerful chant-like feel of build-up, of anticipation and momentum. When these conditions are met, (not if but when), then America will be Frederick Douglass’s dream. First, all Black Americans (the “our”) will enjoy real freedom, freedom as essential as air and as reliable and as useful as the earth. Second, freedom will be enjoyed by all Americans: It will belong “at last to all” (Line 3). More to the point, this freedom will not be regarded as some political right bestowed on people. Rather, freedom will become part of what people are, as essential as their brain or their muscle reflexes or their beating heart (“diastole, systole” [Line 4]). Most importantly, freedom will no longer be a rhetorical flourish (the “gaudy mumbo jumbo” [Line 6]) of insincere politicians.

Once those five conditions are met, the speaker argues, then the daring vision of Frederick Douglass, “this former slave, this Negro / Beaten to his knees” (Line 7), will be not just an idea but a reality. Once all citizens enjoy freedom, that America will reflect the America that Douglass conceived, where “none is lonely, none hunted, alien” (Line 9). Testimony to the impact of Douglass and his hopeful vision for America will be affirmed by the American people themselves, “the lives grown out of his life” (Line 13). The free people of the United States will each be a “fleshing of [Douglass’s] dream of the beautiful, needful thing” (Line 14). Frederick Douglass, a man “superb in love and logic” (Line 10), will then be celebrated in the only way fitting to a man with such broad vision: through all the lives liberated by his activism, his rhetoric, his faith, and his passion.