presence, and they were with you in the most personal and intimate activity, having your meals and so on. Everything was touched by the horror and the brutality and criminality of war. I feel that's one of the best of the poems." The impact of Euro-American innovation on Hayden's poetry and also his continuous assertions that he needed to be viewed as an "American poet" as opposed to a "black poet" prompted much feedback of him as an abstract "Uncle Tom" by African-American critics during the 1960s. However, African-American history, contemporary black figures, for example, Malcolm X, and African-American communities, especially Hayden's native Paradise Valley, were the subjects of a significant number of his poems. 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. The festival had more than ten thousand people from thirty-seven nations in attendance. However, on April 22, 1966, Hayden was denounced at a Fisk University conference of black writers by a group of young protest poets led by Melvin Tolson for refusing to identify himself as a black poet. Nature Poetry Hayden is also known as a nature poet and is included in the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. His poem "A Plague of Starlings" is one of the more famous of his nature-based poems. The poem "Night-Blooming Cereus" is another example of Hayden's depiction of the natural world. The poem presents as a series of haiku-like stanzas. Hayden said that he was inspired by a trip to Duluth, Minnesota during the smelt fishing season. He describes how the poem "[...]turned into a haiku, where you get it all by suggestion and implication". Poetic Influences Robert Hayden has often been praised for his work crafting of poems, the unique perspectives in his work, his exact language, and his absolute command of traditional poetic techniques and structures. Hayden's influences included Elinor Wylie, Countee Cullen, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, John Keats, W. H. Auden and W. B. Yeats. Legacy Hayden was elected to the American Academy of Poets in 1975. His most famous poem is "Those Winter Sundays", which deals with the memory of fatherly love and loneliness. It ranks among the most anthologized American poems of the twentieth century. He declined the position later called United States Poet Laureate