Complete Poems Claude McKay / William Maxwell / William Maxwell
2004
eBook
Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred previously unpublished works, this unique collection showcases the intellectual range of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the ...Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose life and work were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest. McKay's first poems were composed in rural Jamaican creole and launched his lifelong commitment to representing everyday black culture from the bottom up. Migrating to New York, he reinvigorated the English sonnet and helped spark the Harlem Renaissance with poems such as "If We Must Die." After coming under scrutiny for his communism, he traveled throughout Europe and North Africa for twelve years and returned to Harlem in 1934, having denounced Stalin's Soviet Union. By then, McKay's pristine "violent sonnets" were giving way to confessional lyrics informed by his newfound Catholicism. McKay's verse eludes easy definition, yet this complete anthology, vividly introduced and carefully annotated by William J. Maxwell, acquaints readers with the full transnational evolution of a major voice in twentieth-century poetry.
Emergence of the New Negro Mckay, Claude; Toomer, Jean; Fauset, Jessie ...
To Make a Poet Black,
08/2018
Book Chapter
By the time of the death of Booker Washington in 1915 the Negro, with Dr. DuBois as chief architect, had reared a complicated thought structure designed as impregnable against the shifting ...circumstances of that day. He was certain that he must assimilate the characteristics of white America, while at the same time he took pride in his own peculiar contribution to American civilization. He earnestly wished to develop a culture within a culture at the same time laughing derisively at those who urged a forty-ninth state for the colonization of Negroes. Whenever possible he ignored all consciousness of race, and
