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“The Lynching” by Claude McKay (1920)
There was a resurgence in lynching of African Americans toward the end of the 1910s. The racist organization the Ku Klux Klan was revived in 1915, and this caused suffering for many Black people, especially in the South. In 1919, there were 76 lynchings in the United States, the highest in a decade. This is what prompted McKay to write the sonnet, “The Lynching,” which was published in Cambridge Magazine in 1920 and reprinted in McKay’s collection Harlem Shadows. The poem is about the lynching of a Black man. His corpse is still displayed the next morning, and crowds, including women and children, come to look. The women show no sorrow, and the boys (“lynchers that were to be” [Line 13]) joyfully run around the corpse. The victim is a Christlike figure; his spirit has risen to heaven, having been called home by his father. With its image of passive suffering, the sonnet is less militant in its approach than other sonnets by McKay, such as “If We Must Die.”
“The Tropics in New York” by Claude McKay (1920)
Not all of McKay’s poems are about racial oppression. A common theme in his work is nostalgia for his homeland in the Caribbean, which is often lovingly evoked as a kind of paradise and strongly contrasted with the busy, sometimes alienated life in the city. “The Tropics in New York” is one of his best-known poems. It was published in his collections, Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920) and Harlem Shadows (1922). The speaker is an immigrant to America. He sees a display of tropical fruit in a store window in a street in New York, and he feels a wave of nostalgia for the tropical island where he spent his youth.
“The White City” by Claude McKay (1921)
If “America” portrays the poet’s ambivalence toward his racist country, there is no such ambivalence in “The White City,” which was published in The Liberator and then reprinted in Harlem Shadows in 1922. This sonnet expresses hate, pure and simple. The white city of the title is likely New York. The speaker’s “dark Passion” (Line 6) of hatred fills his “every mood” (Line 6) and feeds him “vital blood” (Line 8). There is no room for the love that is expressed in “America.”
“After All These Decades, The Complete Poems of Claude McKay” by John Lowney (2004)
This is a review of the book The Complete Poems of Claude McKay, edited by William J. Maxwell and published in 2004. This was the first comprehensive volume of McKay’s poetry. Lowney gives a lively overview of the entire range of McKay’s life and work, pointing out his many achievements. Lowney emphasizes the thoroughness of Maxwell’s introduction and presentation of McKay’s work, out of which the poet emerges as “a more important figure than literary historians have previously recognized.”
Claude McKay: The Literary Identity from Jamaica to Harlem and Beyond by Kotti Sree Ramesh and Kandula Nirupa Ran (2006)
This study of McKay’s life and work explores how different cultures shaped him. First was the British West Indies in which he grew up, followed by the United States, which he experienced as an immigrant. The book also considers McKay’s extensive travels in Europe and Africa. The authors delve into McKay’s struggle for self-identity and cover issues such as race, exile, ethnicity, and sexuality.
“Why You Should Know Harlem Renaissance Writer Claude McKay Even If You’ve Never Heard of Him” by Christopher Borelli (2017)
This article for the Chicago Tribune is an excellent journalistic exploration of McKay’s life, work, and influence. The article followed the posthumous 2017 publication of McKay’s novel Amiable with Big Teeth, a political satire written in 1941, the manuscript of which was found only in 2009. Borelli discusses the fluctuations in McKay’s reputation, and although he writes mainly about McKay’s prose works, he also comments that by the time of his death, the sonnet “If We Must Die” “was on its way to transcending the African-American experience and speaking to resistance movements worldwide.”
The Beinecke Library at Yale uploaded this video to YouTube in June 2020.
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By Claude McKay