Harlem Shadows: Poems by Claude McKay

Harlem Shadows: Poems Reviews

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  Oscreads

  Enjoyed this one a lot!! Loved reading more of Claude McKays work. I highly recommend this one for those who want to read some poetry.
• 
  Lois

  I quite enjoyed this.
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  Nicole Falche

  I've been trying to read all the major works of the Harlem Renaissance so I decided to finally dive into a little of its poetry. Claude McKay has a way with words about love and loss that make you feel the connection, passion, heartache and absence. He has several poems about the wonders and beauty of nature, while also speaking of the magic found in the city that never sleeps. He speaks of New York with passion and anger that reminds readers what America was really like back then and how it treated the black community (and still does). Despite his justified rage I saw this as a collection of LOVE; Love for flowers, love for places, love for a country that doesn't exist yet and love for other people.
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  Tonya Johnson

  Awesome
  
  Another great classic that's available on kindle unlimited. There are a series of these classics. I'm going to read them all!! Included in series are books from Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington and Sojourner Truth, just to name a few.
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  Grady Ormsby

  Though a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay is not known to most people. He was born in Jamaica in 1890. As a teenager he met Walter Jekyll, an English clergyman who renounced religion, emigrated to Jamaica, and became a planter. In addition, and most important for McKay, he collected and published songs and stories from the local African-Caribbean community. Jekyll became a mentor and an inspiration for the young man and encouraged him to focus on his writing. In 1912. McKay published his first book of poems, Songs of Jamaica, They were the first poems written and published in Jamaican Patois [a dialect of mainly English words and Twi (Ghanaian language).]
  
  McKay’s parents were well-to-do farmers and had the means to foster his education. In the same year that his poems were published he went to Alabama to attend Tuskegee Institute. He didn’t stay long due to what he considered a regimented atmosphere. He went to study agronomy at Kansas State Agricultural College. It was there that he read W. E. B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk. This had a powerful impact on him and stirred his interest in politics. In 1914 he decided he did not want to be an agronomist and moved to New York City to focus on writing and politics.
  
  There he met Crystal and Max Eastman, publishers of The Liberator, a monthly socialist magazine. McKay served as co-executive editor until 1922. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World. He also became involved with a group of black radicals and fought for black self-determination within the context of socialist revolution.
  
  In 1919 McKay traveled to London. He wound up staying several years. From there he was a frequent traveler. He went to Russia and Morocco and after that spent eleven years venturing through Europe and parts of Northern Africa.
  
  Though often living or traveling abroad, he is considered to be a major writer of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. His work challenged white authority while celebrating Jamaican culture. Among his works that challenged racial discrimination is the poem “If We Must Die.” Along with “The Lynching” it is viewed as a call for his people to fight with determination and courage against those who would murder them. It is included in the collection I read, Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay.
  
  The poems in the volume fall into several categories. There are love poems, city/country poems, poems comparing tropic and temperate climates with an abundance of floral references. There is childhood nostalgia, anger, alienation, and introspection over his mother’s early death. Politically his message was socialist with calls to workers to rise. Not unpatriotic his attitude was, “America despite your hatred, I still love you.”
  
  Most of the poems are sonnets with a few octets usually rendered in iambic pentameter. He uses varied meter and varied rhyme. His diction is sometimes hyperbolic and over-blow but can be excused as a function of passion.
  
  A prolific writer, he published six collections of poetry, seven works of fiction, and four of non-fiction as well as a collection of music.
  
• 
  lauraღ

  I will come out, back to your world of tears,
  A stronger soul within a finer frame.

  
  3.5 stars. Really lovely! At first I just thought this collection was okay; I wished it would touch more on Jamaica and immigration than it did, and also, a lot of the poems rhyme and are metred. That isn't always my favourite form of poetry, if it isn't precisely and skilfully done, because with a lot of poets it tends to sound forced, as if they're trying to choke the idea into the format, and trim the edges so it fits. And I have to say, a few of these poems did feel like that to me, and I found myself wondering what they would sound like in free verse. But about halfway through the collection, things just sorta picked up, and I started enjoying it a lot more. Especially just for the poetic language, and how he spoke about romance. A lot of pretty phrasing. I do kinda wish there'd been more dialect, but, ah well. Listened to the audiobook as read by Ron Butler, which was pretty okay. Not my favourite performance from him, but good. I'd love to read more of McKay's poetry, especially his works about Jamaica.
• 
  Hannah

  RTC
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  Jaclyn

  This was an impulse buy, and I’m so glad I did! I loved all of the poems in here. His imagery is beautiful.
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  Sloane Deterding

  I liked these but didn't love them
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  Soph

  read for school, but was actually quite good
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  Jeremy Lucas

  Placed in time, a contemporary peer of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay’s poetry in Harlem Shadows feels incredibly juvenile and shallow, like he never really digs below the surface of what bothers him, jumping from stale rhymes that were forced into the text. Even when he’s dealing with love, or the loss of it, most of his words come across like the reflections of a teenage boy, with potential for serious contemplation that never really gets going beyond the satisfaction of human desire. But as writers go, McKay was also a rising novelist at the time of Harlem Shadows and I’d be willing to see if his storytelling dove into more uncharted waters. Because every once in a while, this young poet showed glimmers of great, rhythmic style.
  
  “If we must die, O let us nobly die,
  So that our precious blood may not be shed
  In vain: then even the monsters we defy
  Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
  ...We’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
  Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”
• 
  Rebecca Reid

  In Harlem Shadows (published 1922), McKay captures his shock and disappointment at the discrimination he found in the United States. Racial identity is a key theme throughout the volume, and I found these themes hidden in many poems. He also wrote poems that encouraged people to be themselves, and his personal voice gives these poems an urgency. He also poignantly captures his homesickness for his tropical home. And although he wrote Harlem Shadows almost a century ago, his search for identity and place in a busy foreign world is one that we can still relate to.
  
  I am a white woman and a stay-at-home mom living close to where I was born, and yet McKay’s racial frustrations and calls for individuals to remain strong, as well as his longings for the familiar, resonate with me. McKay’s beautiful poetry is well worth reading and revisiting.
  
  
  More on my blog
• 
  Colin Cox

  Recently, I spoke to a class about the antagonism I feel toward the literature anthology. There are a handful of reasons to find anthologies frustrating, but on this day I spoke about how anthologies circumscribe a reader’s understanding of a writer, poet, or playwright. This tendency is particularly noticeable with poets. Too often, anthologies reduce volumes of production to a compact series of predictable poems. Naturally, as with all anthologies, there is a utility to this practice, but that utility comes at the cost of understanding the breadth and scope of a poet’s production. Plus, many anthologies ignore underwhelming or simply bad poems by canonical figures. There is little, I argue, more instructive than reading a bad poem from a great poet.
  
  This is one of many reasons why I read Claude McKay’s 1922 collection, Harlem Shadows. It is a breathtaking collection of poems that demonstrate McKay’s range and skill. In addition to heavily-anthologized poems such as “Harlem Shadows” and “America,” Harlem Shadows contains thoughtful, and at times underwhelming, poems on home, racial, social, and geographic displacement, and even romance. Reading Harlem Shadows in its entirety is an education in the ways single volumes of poetry trace the development of a poet’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and preoccupations. Many, for example, of McKay’s early poems focus on his memories of Jamaica, the home he left in 1912 when he migrated to the United States. This theme fades near the end of Harlem Shadows, and in its place steps a cavalcade of poems about unrequited love. These themes bookend Harlem Shadows beautifully and suggest a possible sense of maturity on the poet’s part.
  
  Not every poem in Harlem Shadows is perfect, but that remains one of the book’s most appealing features. Harlem Shadows is a flawed and imperfect read, but its blemishes are just as striking as its beauty marks.
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  Hollis

  This collection was a joy to read with the season transitioning from spring to summer. McKay's language is often sweet and to the point, undergirding by soft, traditional musical forms. Furthermore, this affect is influenced by his love for naturalistic imagery and reference to various plants and animals. The vast majority of poems here run a half page and feel like sketched vignettes. This concise is impressive, given the focus usually directed to a single figure (like a worker or dancer) or event (like a lynching or a baptism). Of special interest is the large offering of sonnets as well as the manner in which McKay uses the form to speak on racism and social unrest. While race, class consciousness, immigration, and city life appear as consistent themes, this is ultimately a very romantic volume. Some interesting poems sprinkled across the text speak to an interracial love affair, offering intriguing historical documentation to the social anxieties suffusing McKay's contemporary. Some favorite poems include: "Homing Swallows," "The White City," "My Mother," "The Tired Worker," and "The Lynching."
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  Morgan

  So, I really liked this, but, despite some amazing moments, I didn’t love it the way I wanted to.
  
  It’s hard to fully assess this work without recognizing that McKay was intentionally using sonnets as a way to talk heavy subjects with a lilting aristocratic form. He could talk about sex, slavery, institutional racism, capitalism, prostitution, marijuana and rebellion kind of under the radar because the format makes light of these.
  
  That said, the sonnet for did frequently interfere with my absolute enjoyment of his otherwise fantastic lyricism.
  
  Still, there are some truly powerful pieces in this, sitting right next to some wondrous delights.
• 
  Drew

  Who's the greatest sonneteer of the 20th century? Claude McKay certainly gives Edna St. Vincent Millay a run for the money. (Please make your argument in sonnet form, using their last names for the final couplet.) But whereas Millay sticks to love as her topic, McKay's iambic passion is something altogether different. His finest poems in this realm -- "If We Must Die," "The White City," and "The Lynching" -- are incandescent with fury. Injustice, too, can make the heart ache. Which isn't to say the man couldn't pen a perfectly delectable love poem: "Romance" is one of the sweetest bits of amorous verse I've read in a long, long time. It's not a sonnet but the rhymes are sublime.
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  Julie Greene

  Fascinating to read this book of poetry by Claude McKay that helped kick off the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to the several famous ones, there are many that evoke the time and are quite powerful. The best known is "If We Must Die," and it is useful to see that classic poem alongside the others. But most of these were written during the "red summer" of 1919, with its race riots, racism, but also the degree of fighting back against oppression by African Americans, and many of the poems capture that spirit.
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  Jeffrey Petit-bois

  A great volume of black poetry
  
  Often the voice of a black man is required to be heard between all the brouhaha of the modern world. And a powerful and profound voice like that of Mr. McKay is much needed, he cuts deep into the hearts of his readers and reminds them of his and their humanity in emotion and human experience.
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  Catherine Gottwalt

  I was delighted to discover McKay seemed to especially enjoy writing about winter, and he wrote well about ideas of race and home, too. It was easy to feel the drudgery that could be life in New York, the longing for what his life was like in Jamaica, and bursts of hope or mirth when celebrating moments of affection or a new dawn.
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  Kira Boonyea

  Sonnets, botany and physical love? Five stars. The contrasts between the environs of McCay’s youth in lushly tropical Jamaica and the cold wet city of NYC hit hard as well, with nature a force for love and health and the populous city a force for racism, illness, overwork. I love the odes to Spanish Needle, jasmine, flame lilies, and the celebration of languor in French Leave.
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  Greg Bem

  Insightful to read after barely hearing of Claude at all in my journey through poetry. While the poetry is definitely of a different Era, it does seem important to recognize the roots of various contemporary poets and Claude's work is definitely one of them!
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  Terry Jess

  Some of this is a very traditional style of poetry, which isn’t my preference, but WOW do some of these hit hard. There is a lot of insight into experiencing America while Black in this volume. My favorite was probably Outcast.
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  Mandy

  Quite extraordinary, easy as it seems at first, but then progresses into something stylistically and emotionally complex.
  
  Like the awakening, it seems somewhat cliché at first glance, but then you contextualise it, you find out that this is where the “cliché”’s originated.
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  fares

  radical, poignant and beautifully written poetry. searching (rather demanding) for liberation, longing for home, grieving his mother, and loving his people. only from reading this introduction did i learn that he was queer and some of it shows in his work
• 
  Audrey Cook

  Instantly, Claude Mckay is up there as a favourite writer. Such beautifully written poetry in here. He does not miss! The lyricism and whimsy that sings his life and activism to you, right up my street.
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  Gabe Eggers

  While infusing fresh lyricism to traditional forms, this collection from Claude McKay is a poignant look at the early Harlem Renaissance in a way that still feels relevant today (sadly so, in some cases, but often joyfully so as well).
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  Jae Philon

  Beautiful words of the past
  
  Its a privilege to be able to read the works of literary greats from the past. Beautiful words during a painful era in the black community. To be able to see past the struggle and see forth a greater future is beautiful in itself.
• 
  VJ

  I don't want to review this text because I don't care for poetry and this volume is poetry. For those who like, enjoy!