Complete Poems

by Claude McKay, William Maxwell

Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred previously unpublished works, this unique collection showcases the intellectual range of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose life and work were marked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.

Genres: Poetry

456 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Jamaican-born American writer Claude McKay figured prominently in the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s; his works include collections of poetry, such as Constab Ballads (1912), and novels, including Home to Harlem (1928).

Home to Harlem, a best-seller, won Festus Claudius McKay, a poet and a seminal figure, the Harmon gold award for literature.
He also wrote novels Banjo and Banana Bottom . People not yet published his manuscript, called Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem , of 1941.
McKay also authored collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, Gingertown . He authored two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica , published posthumously. He entitled a non-fiction, socio-historical treatise Harlem: Negro Metropolis . People published his poetry collection, Harlem Shadows , in 1922 among the first books during the Harlem renaissance. Survivors published his Selected Poems posthumously in 1953.

Reviews

[James F · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[matt Sandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

also a real beauty of a volume, great notes, great intro, great poems. gems for people who already know McKay include a cycle written in a Paris hospital fighting off the syphilis.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[John Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressive collection of prescient poems, many of them sonnets, touching on American racism, urban life, communism, and Christianity. Also includes solid notes.

[Matthew Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[j.e.rodriguez · Rating 3 out of 5]

"And where life lay asleep broods darkly death."

[Anna]

Contains "If We Must Die."