"Middle Passage" is a poem by

Robert Hayden Robert Hayden (August 4, 1913February 25, 1980) was an American poet, essayist, and educator. He served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1976 to 1978, a role today known as US Poet Laureate. He was the first African-Americ ...

. Hayden first published the poem in 1945 and revised it in 1962.

Background and publication

The American poet

started researching with the intent of writing his poem in the late 1930s and started to write "Middle Passage" in 1941 and sought to include it in '' The Black Spear'', an "epic sequence" of poetry inspired by

Stephen Vincent Benét Stephen Vincent Benét (; July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943) was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. He is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, ''John Brown's Body'' (1928), for which he receive ...

's work '' John Brown’s Body''. Hayden based the poem in part on ''

The Waste Land ''The Waste Land'' is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the Octob ...

'' by T. S. Eliot. He first published the poem in ''

Phylon ''Phylon'' (subtitle: ''the Clark Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture'') is a semi-annual peer-reviewed academic journal covering culture in the United States from an African-American perspective. It was established in 1940 by W. E. B. D ...

'' in 1945. He significantly revised it for publication in his 1962 ''A Ballad of Remembrance''. "Middle Passage" is the "centerpiece" of ''A Ballad of Remembrance'', and that collection is considered to have played a large role in increasing Hayden's reputation as a poet. It was then republished in several of Hayden's other anthologies with minor revisions, including ''Selected Poems'' (1966) and ''Angle of Ascent'' (1975).

Content and revision

Hayden said that in writing the poem he sought to “contribute toward an understanding of what our frican-Americanpast had really been like”. He was likely influenced by the recent

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

and

The Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...

. "Middle Passage" follows the

transatlantic slave trade The Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, or Euro-American slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and i ...

and is focused on the events surrounding the mutiny on ''

La Amistad ''La Amistad'' (; Spanish for ''Friendship'') was a 19th-century two- masted schooner, owned by a Spaniard colonizing Cuba. It became renowned in July 1839 for a slave revolt by Mende captives, who had been captured and sold to European slave ...

'' in July 1839. Hayden sought to redefine African-American history through his poem. The original version of the poem has some

typographical errors A typographical error (often shortened to typo), also called a misprint, is a mistake (such as a spelling mistake) made in the typing of printed (or electronic) material. Historically, this referred to mistakes in manual type-setting (typography). ...

and mistakes in how it was

set Set, The Set, SET or SETS may refer to: Science, technology, and mathematics Mathematics *Set (mathematics), a collection of elements *Category of sets, the category whose objects and morphisms are sets and total functions, respectively Electro ...

. In revising the poem, Hayden made it around forty-three lines shorter.

Reception

Most critical analysis has focused on Hayden's revised version of "Middle Passage". While ''A Ballad of Remembrance'' received relatively little note upon publication, scholarly attention grew in the years that followed, winning the 1966 '' Grand Prix de la Poésie'' at the first

World Festival of Negro Arts The World Festival of Black Arts (French: Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres), also known as FESMAN, is a month-long culture and arts festival that takes place in Africa. The festival features poetry, sculpture, painting, music, cinema, theatre, f ...

. The poem has generally been well received. It has been described as an "anti- epic" for taking many key features present in epic poetry and inverting them.

References

{{Reflist 1945 poems African-American poetry