Complete PoemsUniversity of Illinois Press, 2004 M01 29 - 456 pages Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred previously unpublished works, this unique collection showcases the intellectual range of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose life and work were marked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. |
Contents
Jamaican periodical poetry 191112 | 1 |
constab ballads 1912 | 86 |
early english and american poetry191622 | 130 |
harlem shadows 1922 | 152 |
the clinic circa 1923 | 197 |
the years between 192534 | 208 |
cities circa 1934 | 223 |
the cycle circa 1943 | 241 |
final catholic poetry 194547 | 270 |
notes to the poems | 281 |
393 | |
395 | |
401 | |