He was taken in by a foster family next door, Sue Ellen Westerfield and William Hayden, and grew up in the Detroit neighborhood called "Paradise Valley".

[2] The Haydens' perpetually contentious marriage, coupled with Ruth Sheffey's competition for her son's affections, made for a traumatic childhood.

Witnessing fights and suffering beatings, Hayden lived in a house fraught with "chronic anger", the effects of which would stay with him throughout his life.

He attended Detroit City College (later called Wayne State University) with a major in Spanish and minor in English and left in 1936 during the Great Depression, one credit short of finishing his degree, to go to work for the Works Progress Administration Federal Writers' Project, where he researched black history and folk culture.

[5] In pursuit of a master's degree, Hayden studied under W. H. Auden, who directed his attention to issues of poetic form, technique, and artistic discipline.

Postal Service issued a pane of stamps featuring ten great Twentieth Century American Poets, including Hayden.

Hayden's beliefs about the relationship of the artist to his poems likewise had an impact in his refusal to compose emotionally determined protest sonnets.

[12] His work often addressed the plight of African Americans, usually using his former home of Paradise Valley slum as a backdrop, as he does in the poem "Heart-Shape in the Dust".

He made ready use of black vernacular and folk speech, and he wrote political poetry as well, including a sequence on the Vietnam War.

[10] On April 7, 1966, Hayden's Ballad of Remembrance was awarded, by unanimous vote, the Grand Prize for Poetry at the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal.

[citation needed] Hayden's influences included Elinor Wylie, Countee Cullen, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, John Keats, W. H. Auden and W. B.

He declined the position later called United States Poet Laureate previously, accepted the appointment for 1976–1977 during America's Bicentennial, and again in 1977–1978 though his health was failing then.

[13] In January 1980 Hayden was among those gathered to be honored by President Jimmy Carter and his wife at a White House reception celebrating American poetry.