This chapter addresses the flowering of African American poetry that occurs from 1945 to 1970 against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and in the context of a period of tumultuous change in the history of race relations in America. The chapter discusses how poets such as Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka grapple in various ways with fraught questions about aesthetics, race, identity, and politics. The chapter examines the emergence of the influential and controversial movement known as the Black Arts Movement (led by poets including Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni) in the context of the turbulent racial violence and social justice movements of the 1960s.

Ready-made histories of 1960s cultural development might easily overlook Robert Hayden. His apparently genteel politics, reflected in commitments to racial cosmopolitanism and substantial reverence for the Western canon, distinguished him from many of the innovators and experimentalists of 1960s Black radical poetry. However, Hayden’s distinctive contributions to the decade played a key role in the evolution of African American poetics. His political aesthetic became an important model for successful Black poets of the later twentieth century. These academic poets, whose professional and intellectual lives were distanced from the economic and cultural exigencies of the Black majority, learned much from Hayden’s theory of aesthetic distance. While a powerful Black aesthetic of the 1960s called for art that appeared to spring from the heart of the Black folk masses, Hayden honed a deeply introspective Black poetics, which contemplated the experiential distance that stretched between the “colleged” poet-speaker and the Black folk world.