This book explores the influence of the Bahá'í Faith on one of America's most respected poets.
Robert Hayden was winner of the Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, and 1975 Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. He served two terms as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and, until his death in 1980, professor of English at the University of Michigan and poetry editor for the Bahá'í magazine World Order.
In this book John Hatcher examines the various dimensions of Hayden's poetry, and especially the link between the poet and his Faith, which has remained largely unexplored and imperfectly understood. The author writes from his own perspective as Robert Hayden's friend and fellow Bahá'í, as a poet and teacher himself and a serious student of Hayden's poetry, and in uncovering its Bahá'í frame of reference he explores Hayden's poetic voice whose faith is present, at a profound level, in all his work.
