Robert Hayden was an American poet and essayist, who wrote mostly about the African-American community and the experiences they had to go through. Although he himself was an African-American, he never wanted to be categorized as a “black poet”. Instead, he wanted his works be judged by all the critical and historical standards, by which any other English-language poetry is judged, a stance that made him unpopular among Black poets. Born and raised in poverty in a ghetto, suffering from extreme myopia since his childhood, he had a traumatic childhood. Yet, he managed to rise above all to start writing poetry in his elementary school, eventually publishing his first collection at the age of twenty-seven and becoming the first Black member of the English Department of the University of Michigan at the age of thirty-one. However, it was not until he published his Selected Works (originally Ballad of Remembrance) that he became truly famous.