“Progress is a myth,” and Air? The Force of Freedom and Nonsovereign Death in Robert Hayden’s Revisions of “Frederick Douglass”

Reading select works by Calvin Warren and David Marriott to offer a close, rhetorical, and supplemental reading of Robert Hayden’s three iterations of “Frederick Douglass,” this paper initiates a desedimentation of the telos and force of freedom lodged in Hayden’s sonnets. Middlebrow journalism and literary criticism have enlisted the poems to serve the terms of humanist violence that they adumbrate, including with respect to the way the poems evoke “air” itself. This reading considers the poems to be historically minded but not historicist arrangements of language haunted by Western ontometaphysics, distorted sovereignty, and the traces of force that accompany the imagined passage of physis into poiesis. The poems convey what the author calls “metaphysical misery” about the role of black iterative-deathperfection, as exemplified by “Douglass.”