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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.
| 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 |
Overview
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 ...