Complete Poems

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Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred published here for the first time, this landmark collection showcases the range and dynamism of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet whose life and poetry were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest.

His first poems, composed in rural Jamaican dialect, won him fame as the "Jamaican Bobby Burns" and launched his lifelong commitment to representing everyday black culture from the ...

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Overview

Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred published here for the first time, this landmark collection showcases the range and dynamism of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet whose life and poetry were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest.

His first poems, composed in rural Jamaican dialect, won him fame as the "Jamaican Bobby Burns" and launched his lifelong commitment to representing everyday black culture from the bottom up. Reinvigorating the standard English sonnet after migrating to New York, McKay helped to spark the Harlem Renaissance with modern classics such as "If We Must Die."

Coming under scrutiny for his Bolshevist views, McKay left America in 1922 and spent twelve years roaming from Moscow to Tangier via Berlin, Paris, and Barcelona. These shifts in location led to shifts in form, subject, and language, and when McKay returned to Harlem in 1934, having denounced Stalin's Soviet Union, his pristine "Violent sonnets" gave way to confessional lyrics strongly informed by his newfound Catholicism.

McKay eludes easy definition, which is why this complete anthology, vividly introduced and carefully annotated by William J. Maxwell, is at once necessary and rewarding. Here the reader can trace the complex, transnational evolution of a major voice in twentieth-century poetry.

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What People Are Saying

Arnold Rampersad
Claude McKay's Complete Poems comes as an invaluable gift to all lovers of McKay, African-American literature, and literature in general. McKay's eminence among poets of the Harlem Renaissance is richly documented in this scrupulous collection. With a lively, always perceptive introduction and meticulous notes, the Complete Poems stands as the definitive gathering of the verse of a writer who saw early the beauty and humanity of the black world at home and abroad. (author of The Life of Langston Hughes and the Sara Hart Kimball Professor of the Humanities, Stanford University)
Mary Helen Washington
William Maxwell's impressive research and brilliant analysis show that McKay's poetry both defined and defied the boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance. A peripatetic poet, social radical, and self- conscious modernist, McKay explored all the ports of the Black Atlantic, repeatedly traveling on political, religious, literary, and sexual journeys. Maxwell's edition of the Complete Poems requires us to rethink not only McKay but all of twentieth-century black poetry. (editor of Invented Lives and Professor of English, University of Maryland, College Park)
James Smethurst
This is a wonderful book. McKay is a hugely important figure in the development of Caribbean and African American poetry, and bringing his poems together in one place does an invaluable service to readers of all backgrounds. Maxwell's outstanding introduction is the most insightful and cogent critical assessment of McKay's poetry to date. (author of The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946)
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780252028823
  • Publisher: University of Illinois Press
  • Publication date: 1/28/2004
  • Series: American Poetry Recovery Series Series
  • Pages: 456
  • Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 9.25 (h) x 1.40 (d)

Meet the Author

A pioneer of black modernism, Claude McKay's varied and influential books include the poetry collections Harlem Shadows and Songs of Jamaica, and the novels Banjo, Home to Harlem, and Banana Bottom.

William J. Maxwell is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of the award-winning New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars.

 

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Claude McKay - Lyric Poetry in the Age of Cataclysm
Jamaican Periodical Poetry, 1911-12 1
Songs of Jamaica (1912) 19
Constab Ballads (1912) 86
Early English and American Poetry, 1916-22 130
Harlem Shadows (1922) 152
"The Clinic," circa 1923 197
"The Years Between," 1925-34 208
"Cities," circa 1934 223
"The Cycle," circa 1943 241
Final Catholic Poetry, 1945-47 270
Notes to the Poems 281
Works Cited in Notes to the Poems 393
Index of First Lines 395
Index of Titles 401
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