Robert Earl Hayden (1913–1980) grew up in a poor neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan, a place to which he would return in poems collected in Elegies for Paradise Valley (1978). After attending Wayne State University, he received a master's degree from the University of Michigan, where he was professor of English from 1968 until his death in 1980. From 1946 to 1968, he taught at Fisk University in Tennessee.

Hayden built upon his experiences and on the heritage of African Americans to write poetry that spoke for different groups of people throughout history. He made connections to the universal from the experiences and voice of the individual, be it gypsy, slave, or slave trader. His poem "Middle Passage" uses the technique of collage, pioneered by writers such as John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, to evoke the many voices associated with the slave ships that brought African Americans to the New World.

Hayden was a versatile writer, trying various poetic forms and styles to express universally shared emotions. His collections include Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), The Lion and the Archer (1948), and A Ballad of Remembrance (1962). At the First World Festival for Negro Arts in 1966, he received the Grand Prize for Poetry for A Ballad of Remembrance. From 1976–1978, Hayden served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, a position later called Poet Laureate. He was the first black American to hold this position.