Class IX Unit-I Roots-Those Winter Sundays (Poem)

Robert Hayden
Robert Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, Michigan, on August 4, 1913. His parents, Ruth and Asa Sheffey, separated before his birth, and Hayden spent the majority of his childhood in the foster care system. His foster parents, Sue Ellen Westerfield and William Hayden, raised him in a low-income Detroit neighborhood known as Paradise Valley. He had an emotionally tumultuous childhood and was shuttled between the home of his parents and that of a foster family, who lived next door. Because of impaired vision, he was unable to participate in sports, but was able to spend his time reading. In 1932, he graduated from high school and, with the help of a scholarship, attended Detroit City College (later Wayne State University). 
He left college in 1936 to begin working for the Federal Writers’ Project. In this post, Hayden spent time researching African-American history and folk life—subjects that would inspire and inform his poetic work. 
Hayden published his first book of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust, in 1940, at the age of 27. He enrolled in a graduate English Literature program at the University of Michigan where he studied with W. H. Auden. Auden became an influential critical guide in the development of Hayden's writing. Hayden admired the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wiley, Carl Sandburg, and Hart Crane, as well as the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer. He had an interest in African-American history and explored his concerns about race in his writing.
Hayden's poetry gained international recognition in the 1960s and he was awarded the grand prize for poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966 for his book Ballad of Remembrance.
In 1975, Hayden received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and in 1976, he became the first black American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (later called the Poet Laureate). He died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on February 25 in 1980.