Collected Poems (Centenary Edition)

by Robert Hayden, Frederick Glaysher (Editor), Reginald Dwayne Betts (Introduction), Arnold Rampersad (Afterword)

Overview

An exquisite body of work celebrating the centennial of one of the most important African-American poets of the twentieth century.

Robert Hayden was one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century. He left behind an exquisite body of work, collected in this definitive edition, including A Ballad of Remembrance, Words in the Mourning Time, The Night-Blooming Cereus, Angle of Ascent, and American Journal, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Also included is an introduction by American poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, as well as an afterword by Arnold Rampersad that provides a critical and historical context. In Hayden’s work the actualities of history and culture became the launching places for flights of imagination and intelligence. His voice—characterized by musical diction and an exquisite feeling for the formality of pattern—is a seminal one in American life and literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871406798
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	04/01/2013
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	374,498
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Robert Hayden received numerous awards including a Hopwood Award, the Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, and the Russell Loines Award for distinguished poetic achievement from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Frederick Glaysher studied writing under a private tutorial with Robert Hayden at the University of Michigan, from which he holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, the latter in English. The author and editor of several works, he edited Hayden’s Collected Prose as well as the Collected Poems. Robert Hayden is a character in Glaysher’s recently published epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, partly set on the moon, at the landing site of Apollo 11.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer, and the founder and director of Freedom Reads.

Arnold Rampersad (Ph.D. Harvard) is the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at Stanford University. He is co-editor (with Deborah E. McDowell) of Slavery and the Literary Imagination, and editor of the definitive Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. He is the author of the two-volume biography The Life of Langston Hughes, Jackie Robinson: A Biography, and co-author (with Arthur Ashe) of Days of Grace: A Memoir. He is also editor of “The Harlem Renaissance.”

What People are Saying About This

Michael S. Harper

Hayden was a remembrancer, a poet of faith and superb execution, and one of the best teachers by example one can find in the poetry of the twentieth century, or in any age. His words enhance and engage us as awakened selves, a nation in process, an abiding transcendent world voice.

Editorial Reviews

"This luminescent volume reaffirms the beauty and power of his poetry… An enlightening and exciting reclamation of an essential American poet of suffering and radiance."

Booklist

"Hayden was a remembrancer, a poet of faith and superb execution, and one of the best teachers by example one can find in the poetry of the twentieth century, or in any age. His words enhance and engage us as awakened selves, a nation in process, an abiding transcendent world voice."

Michael S. Harper

"When I read his poetry I know that I am in the presence of a man who honors language. His images give the reader a new experience of the world."

Julius Lester