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Robert Hayden: “Those Winter Sundays” by David… | Poetry Foundation

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If there were a Top of the Pops for poetry, Robert Hayden’s "Those Winter Sundays" would be on it. The poem was ranked the 266th most anthologized poem in English in a 2003 Columbia University Press survey. This put it nearly 100 spots ahead of "Paul Revere’s Ride" (#313), but still lagging far behind Robert Frost’s "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (ranked 6th). Born in 1913, Hayden grew up in a destitute African American section of Detroit known as Paradise Valley. A neighbor’s family adopted him at the age of two when his parents separated and his mother could no longer afford to keep him. His adoptive father was a strict Baptist and manual laborer. Still, the new family nurtured Hayden’s early literary interests, and as a teenager, he was immersed in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance and in traditional poets such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Carl Sandburg. While in college Hayden studied with the English poet W.H. Auden, who stressed a poetics of technical precision, fo

If there were a Top of the Pops for poetry, Robert Hayden’s "Those Winter Sundays" would be on it. The poem was ranked the 266th most anthologized poem in English in a 2003 Columbia University Press survey. This put it nearly 100 spots ahead of "Paul Revere’s Ride" (#313), but still lagging far behind Robert Frost’s "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (ranked 6th). Born in 1913, Hayden grew up in a destitute African American section of Detroit known as Paradise Valley. A neighbor’s family adopted him at the age of two when his parents separated and his mother could no longer afford to keep

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