Middle Passage (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Asa Bundy Sheffey
- First Published: 1945
- Type of Work: Poem
- Genres: Poetry, Narrative poetry
- Subjects: Freedom, Suffering, Africa or Africans, Slavery or slaves, Religion, Middle Passage, Spiritual life or spirituality, Fear, Greed, Sailing or sailors, Cruelty, Fifteenth century, Shipwrecks
In “Middle Passage” Hayden mingles the voices of multiple speakers to depict the voyages of slave traders bringing Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. He had been deeply moved by “John Brown's Body,” Stephen Vincent Benét's epic 1928 poem about the Civil War, and Hayden marked a passage in which Benét stated he could not fairly describe the titanic battle from the African American viewpoint. Such a depiction, Benét declared, waited upon a black pen. It became Hayden's ambition to write such an epic, and though he was never to write a full-scale work on this theme, “Middle...
[The entire page is 791 words long]
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