Complete Poems by Claude McKay

Complete Poems Reviews

• 
  James F

  In December I read the Dover Selected Poems, and decided to buy the complete poetry. McKay was a poet of Jamaican origin who emigrated to the United States, spent many years in exile in Europe and north Africa and then returned to the United States. He was one of the first Black intellectuals to adopt a Marxist outlook and support the Soviet Revolution, and one of the first to recognize the Stalinist betrayal of the revolution; unfortunately, his experiences with the Communist Party ultimately led him to become an embittered anti-Communist and to turn to the Catholic Church in his later years, where he was part of the left wing trend around the Catholic Worker movement of Dorothy Day. He was a major influence not only on Jamaican literature and on the Harlem Renaissance and later Afro-American literature, but through his contacts with Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor (both of whom I read recently) on the literature of Africa and the African diaspora in general.
  
  This collection is made up of 323 poems, including his three published books, Songs of Jamaica (1912), Constab Ballads (1912), and Harlem Shadows (1922), and the three books he wrote later but could not get published in his lifetime, The Clinic (ca. 1923), Cities (ca. 1934) and The Cycle (ca. 1943), as well as other poems published in magazines or unpublished, together with an introduction by the editor, William Maxwell. The first two books are in Jamaican dialect, and represent the first use of the language of Jamaica in real literature; the third book is in a very traditional English style, mainly sonnets; the later books and especially the unpublished Catholic poetry are not as good, but taken as a whole the poetry is very much worth reading.
• 
  Cenrique

  The great thing about Claude McKay's poetry is how easily it can be accessed, but, if you choose to linger on the work longer, you can find fantastic depth and nuance. The poems from Harlem Shadows best capture his strengths as a poet. The poems are generally metered and rhymed but they resist tediousness, especially as the works weave a transnational fabric of nostalgic imagery of his homeland Jamaica and the hard, desperate urban landscapes of Harlem, New York. McKay's choice of subject matter makes him a complicated figure of the Harlem Renaissance era. For instance, he used Victorian poetics to describe black nationalist hate for Eurocentricism ("If We Must Die" is one of these, though ironically it was quoted by Winston Churchill to rally English citizens against the German onslaught during WW II). Another example of McKay's complexity is his poems which employ a very conservative English diction to speak very suggestively about taboo love pertaining to race and sexuality. Although some poems are wooden in form and sense, a great many others surprise and delight with their musicality (reading them aloud brings this quality out), their keen observation of human psychology, and gorgeous imagery.
• 
  Matthew

  Content: 5 stars
  Commentary: 4 stars
  Ebook Design: hOw cOuLd u dO thIs!? 0 stars
  
  This book is half poems and half footnotes and commentary on said poems. The footnotes/commentary form the latter half of the book AND THERE IS NO LINK BETWEEN THE POEMS AND THE COMMENTARY. There is no way to navigate between the helpful insights and the poems they reference. If it was a physical book, I would be flipping back and forth but in an ebook there is simply no excuse for this nonsense- especially considering how thoughtful and studious the content of the book turned out to be.
  
  The content of the book is really phenomenal. I should be writing a whole review about that but I'm going to be digesting that for a long time. What a beautiful window into the soul of a real human being!
  
  Watching him mature over time is fascinating. It's so clear that he became more interesting and admirable as a person even as his poetry became less interesting to his contemporary audience. His later compositions simply are not as partisan or ideologically useful as his earlier works. He was a man caught "in between" (races/nations/religions/ideologies) throughout his life but he was politically useful to the left radicals and literati in his earlier career and that made him much more popular. As he grew wise, he became less useful and found it harder to get published.
  
  In my opinion, his later poems are superior, but I was engaged throughout. Only his poems about the various cities left me a little cold because they were a bit indulgent and self-deceptive, even in ways that his revolutionary polemics and highly racialized outbursts were not.
  
  I found much to nourish my soul here.
  
  But seriously wtf- fix the ebook design already. I also wish we could get an audio version with his Jamaican poems being recited with the correct accent- the one in my head is (unsurprisingly) not so great.
  
  
  
• 
  Gijs Limonard

  Some gems to be found in this collected volume. Some favorites:
  
  The New Forces
  In every place, however high, they lurk.
  In the great buildings where the pale youths clerk,
  In ships and in the treasured pits of earth,
  They stir the depths of men and come to birth.
  I feel their mighty presence flaming near,
  Oh, hark, my soul! their voices everywhere.
  
  
  The Lynching
  His Spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven.
  His father, by the cruelest way of pain,
  Had bidden him to his bosom once again;
  The awful sin remained still unforgiven.
  All night a bright and solitary star
  (Perchance the one that ever guided him,
  Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim)
  Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char.
  Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
  The ghastly body swaying in the sun
  The women thronged to look, but never a one
  Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
  And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
  Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.
  
  
  The Needle
  My body quivers to the needle’s sting
  Meeting its point as tempers steel to steel;
  But afterwards my cells in frenzy sing
  The sharp incisive agony they feel.
  
• 
  Shawn Thrasher

  Some of Claude McKay's poems are those of longing and the childhood of his past, the countryside of Jamaica, the land of his birth. Others are full of the joy and terror, busy life and noise of city life, particularly his adopted New York City, and especially Harlem (and the Harlem Renaissance). Much of his poetry speaks of the anguish and anger, and pride, of being a black man in America.
  
  McKay's poetry is very old fashioned, and can seem stilted - but often the messages in his poems are white hot sharp and modern. If he were alive today, I could see him posting some of his shorter, brutally honest and pointed poems about race to Instagram or Twitter.
• 
  Crystalline

  "I know the dark delight of being strange,
  The penalty of difference in the crowd,
  The loneliness of wisdom among fools,
  Yet never have I felt but very proud,
  Though I have suffered agonies of hell,
  Of living in my own peculiar cell."
  
  Some of my all-time best-loved verses.
• 
  Matthew Johnson

  Beautiful poems. Plus, one of the most well-researched reference/note pages I've come across.
• 
  j.e.rodriguez

  "And where life lay asleep broods darkly death."
• 
  Anna

  Contains "If We Must Die."