Robert Hayden

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.

This book brings together important original contributions to scholarly and political/policy debates over the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and especially the war in Bosnia. The analyses are grounded on empirically-based arguments about social and political dynamics, resonate with much larger/enduring issues of social science inquiry, and consistently challenge commonly-held beliefs about the Balkans that are based more on ignorance, misunderstanding, or outright prejudice, than on intimate knowledge of the region, its peoples, and their histories. When first published, some of these essays represented sharply distinctive analyses which have since then become “common wisdom.” Hayden’s arguments about how this multinational European federation collapsed following a severe economic crisis are disturbingly relevant to analyzing the crisis of the European Union twenty years later.

"A collection of essays on poetry and the experiences that influenced poet Robert Hayden. Contents include "The History of Punchinello: A Baroque Play in One Act," Hayden's introductory remarks to volumes like Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro Poet and The New Negro, and interviews with Hayden."

In his new poems, as before, but with a new mixture of modes, Hayden takes up, celebrates, and contends with the history of his people. He is involved with his Black Americanness, without being confined by it. The famous story elements can be found here but above all a renewed delight in the revelatory possibilities of the languages. In addition to the new poems, all the best of Hayden’s earlier work is here, including much that has for too long been unavailable.