McKay, however, went on in his next two novels to express his admiration for the earthy ways of uneducated lower-class blacks, somewhat at the expense of black intellectuals. The remainder of McKay’s published fiction appears inGingertown (1932), a volume of short stories.

McKay also produced a substantial body of literary and social criticism, a revealing selection of which appears, along with a number of his letters and selections from his fiction and poetry, in The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912-1948 (1973), edited by Wayne F. Cooper. An autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), and an important social history, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), round out the list of his principal works.

Later in life, McKay described himself as a “troubador wanderer”; this is a most apt sobriquet, for it stresses his primary attachment to poetry and incidentally alludes to his constant search for the ideal life for the black poet in an essentially white culture. This eremetic existence commenced in 1912, a singularly important year in McKay’s life, for in that year his first volumes of poetry were published (Songs of Jamaica in Kingston and Constab Ballads in London); six of his poems, set to Jekyll’s music, were issued in London; and he won an international poetry contest sponsored by a London newspaper.

McKay’s winning poem was “George William Gordon to the Oppressed Natives,” which celebrated the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion that was supposedly encouraged by the Baptist mulatto politician Gordon. The final stanza of the poem offers a remarkable foreshadowing of what later became McKay’s most famous poem, “If We Must Die”:

Gordon’s heart here bleeds for you.  He will lead to victory:We will conquer every foe,  Or together gladly die.

The poem also contains lines that prefigure the exhortation of McKay’s great propagandistic poems: “Rise, O people of my kind!/ Struggle, struggle to be free.”

Unfortunately, the poem is marred by intrusive approximations of Jamaican dialect in lines that are generally in Standard English poetic idiom: “O, you sons of Afric’s soil” is followed by “Show dem dat you ha’ some brains.” It seems improbable that Gordon would have told Jamaicans that they should “Wake . . ./ De gorilla in your blood/ Though you may be coarse and rude.” Nevertheless, the poet’s enthusiasm, anger, and energy shine through.

In his preface to Songs of Jamaica, which is dedicated (rather judiciously) to Sir Sydney Olivier, the governor of the colony, Walter Jekyll describes Jamaican English as “a feminine version of masculine English; pre-eminently a language of love, as all will feel who, setting prejudice aside, will allow the charmingly naive love-songs of this volume to make their due impression upon them.” Of the fifty poems in the volume, only a few are undeniably love poems in the traditional manner; more are poems that expound love of nature—especially countryside—and love of family. “To Clarendon Hills and H. A. H.” and “My Native Land, My Home” are of the first group, and “Mother Dear” and “To Bennie” illustrate the second. In “To Clarendon Hills and H. A. H.” McKay writes to H. A. H. (described in the poem as a “sorrowin’ an’ sad . . . lad”),

Love me, frien’ o’ mineWid that love of thinePassin’ love of womenkin’,More dan love of womenkin’.

This may be read in several ways, but it suggests a friendship like that of Saul and Jonathan in the Bible (2 Samuel 1:26), a total male commitment.

Throughout Songs of Jamaica, there are intimations that McKay foresaw his imminent wanderings; several poems speak about his intent to return to his native land and to the green hills of the Clarendon district, which held such an attraction for him. “But I’ll return again,” he says in “My Mountain Home”; “In days to come I shall return/ To end my wand’rin’s dere.” This attachment to place is deeply felt, frequently repeated, and sadly ironic, for McKay never returned to his native land and his mountain home; though he enjoyed living in the Soviet Union, in France, in Morocco, and in the United States, he was always the troubador wanderer, the poet without national roots—except in Jamaica, to which he felt that he could never return.

Constab Ballads is patently less lyrical than Songs of Jamaica, and it is clear that the poems in this second volume by McKay would not have fitted in comfortably with the earlier poems. The poems, the poet writes in a brief preface, were all the consequence of his brief sojourn in the Jamaican Constabulary: “To relieve my feelings, I wrote poems, and into them I poured my heart in its various moods. This volume consists of a selection from these poems.” There are twenty-eight poems, many owing inspiration more, perhaps, to Rudyard Kipling than to Robert Burns (whose influence on Song of Jamaica, mainly in the incorporation of dialect, had led to McKay’s being termed the “Jamaican Burns”). There are poems on drills, marches, fire practices, payday, and comradeship, but none rises above the mundane except “Sukkee River,” which seems to have been intended for Songs of Jamaica, since it celebrates the poet’s love for the countryside, flora, and streams of his native land and for his happiness in swimming, naked and alone, in what he describes as “a fairy dream.” Once more McKay comments on the love between him and nature, a love purer than “de love o’ men,” and vows never to roam again from his Jamaican Eden.

Although there are some true gems of both concept and expression in McKay’s initial two volumes of poetry, it is unlikely that any except Jamaicans and scholars will take any real pleasure in reading them. Even in 1912, Jekyll thought it necessary to add extensive footnotes to Songs of Jamaica to explain the poems’ contractions, allusions, and pronunciation, and both a glossary and footnotes were added to Constab Ballads. While for some readers these may be helpful, they undeniably signal difficulties for others and suggest that the dialect poems must be regarded as belonging to a special time and place; that is, that they are not really relevant to the major achievements of Claude McKay as a poet, notwithstanding their unquestionable depth of feeling, value as precursors of subsequent subjects and themes, and place in the development of an indigenous poetic literature in Jamaica.

Claude McKay received a medal from the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences (1912), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Harmon Foundation Award (1929) for Harlem Shadows and Home to Harlem, an award from the James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild (1937), and the Order of Jamaica. He was named that country’s national poet in 1977.

McKay’s contribution to American poetry cannot, however, be measured in awards and citations alone. His peculiar pilgrimage took him from Jamaica to Moscow, from communism to Catholicism, from Harlem to Marseilles. He lived and worked among common laborers most of his life, and developed a respect for them worthy of that of Walt Whitman. He rejected the critical pronouncements of his black contemporaries, and as poet and critic Melvin Tolson points out, he “was unaffected by the New Poetry and Criticism.” His singular blend of modern political and social radicalism with the timeworn cadences of the sonnet won for him, at best, mixed reviews from many critics, black and white.

In any attempt to calculate his poetic achievement, however, one must realize that, with the exception of his early Jamaican dialect verse (certainly an important contribution in its own right to the little-studied literature of the British West Indies) and some rather disappointing poetry composed late in his life, his poetic career spanned little more than a decade. At the publication in 1922 of Harlem Shadows, the furthest extent of his poetic development, he was only thirty-three. McKay should be read as a poet on the way up, who turned his attention almost exclusively to prose after his initial success in verse.

Surely there is no more ludicrous task than to criticize a writer on the basis of his potential, and so one should take McKay as one finds him, and indeed, in those terms, he does not fare badly. His was the first notable voice of anger in modern black American poetry. Writing when he did, he had to struggle against the enormous pressure, not of white censure, but of a racial responsibility that was his, whether he wanted it or not. He could not be merely a poet—he had to be a “black poet,” had to speak, to some extent, for countless others; such a position is difficult for any poet. Through it all, however, he strove for individuality, and fought to keep from being bought by any interest, black or white, right- or left-wing.

Largely through the work of McKay and of such Harlem Renaissance contemporaries as Countée Cullen and Langston Hughes, the task of being a black poet in America was made easier. Harlem Shadows marked a decisive beginning toward improving the predicament so concisely recorded by Cullen, who wondered aloud in the sonnet “Yet Do I Marvel” how a well-intentioned God could in his wisdom do “this curious thing:/ To make a poet black and bid him sing.”

There is no doubt that McKay’s use of dialect in his poems was an advance on the use of dialect by such predecessors as Paul Laurence Dunbar, who used it largely for either comic or role-establishing purposes; McKay used dialect for social verisimilitude, to attempt to capture the Jamaican inflections and idiom, to differentiate the speech of the folk from that of the colonial classes. Upon quitting Jamaica for the United States, however, McKay discontinued his use of dialect, even when, in some of his American “protest” poems that make use of African American diction, dialect would be appropriate and even effective.

Few poets have had such success as McKay had achieved by the time that he was twenty-two. He was little less than a literary phenomenon at a time when A. B. Paterson in Australia and Stephen Leacock in Canada were helping to create the bases for their own colonies’ characteristic verse traditions. McKay explored new subjects, new themes, and new forms of speech and language in his poetry.

In 1914, McKay went to New York, where he quickly identified himself with the socialist confraternity—even though he was a black in an essentially white (and largely Jewish) community. Notwithstanding his differences (as a black, a West Indian, and a British subject), he identified with the writers whom he met, and he stressed that the blacks of the United States shared most of the deprivations of the blacks of the Caribbean and Africa. In fact, it has been noted that McKay was the true father of the concept of “negritude”—of pride in blackness—that became a hallmark of advanced literature from Africa and the Caribbean a generation after McKay’s Harlem Renaissance days. He was the first and most vocal advocate of racial consciousness, of racial pride for Africans and African Americans alike.

Spring in New Hampshire, and Other Poems, McKay’s first volume of poetry in Standard English, which was published in London, and Harlem Shadows, which appeared two years later in New York, established him as a major poet in the black community and as a potentially important one in English literature. Harlem Shadows, with its brilliant evocation of life in the black ghetto of New York City, more than any other book heralded the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, from which developed the great florescence of African American culture in subsequent years. Immediately after the publication of Harlem Shadows, McKay visited the Soviet Union, sojourned in Europe for a decade, and turned his talents to the writing of short stories, novels, and social commentaries; he did not devote his full attention to poetry again until he was in his last years, when he was in physical decline and seemed to lack the poetic inspiration of the earlier period. In fact, the great number of manuscript poems that he left (most never published) are rather saddening: They lack the deftness of construction, the genius for the affecting tone, the brilliance of image that are to be found in both the dialect poems and the two volumes of Standard English poems.

In 1953, McKay’s former friend and collaborator Max Eastman was instrumental in arranging for the publication of Selected Poems of Claude McKay, which contains an appreciative introduction by the eminent American philosopher and educator Professor John Dewey of Columbia University as well as a brief biographical note by Eastman himself. It is this collection that has maintained the reputation of McKay, and though it is highly selective, it is a fair presentation of the scope of McKay’s poetry.

In his post-Jamaican poetry, McKay became attached almost exclusively to the sonnet form, eschewed dialect, and showed no strong inclination to experiment with rhyme, rhythm, and the other components of the sonnet. Further, he displayed the influence of his early reading of the English Romantics (under the tutelage of Walter Jekyll), and in the words of Wayne Cooper, McKay’s biographer, “his forthright expression of the black man’s anger, alienation, and rebellion against white racism introduced into modern American Negro poetry an articulate militancy of theme and tone which grew increasingly important with time.”

Claude McKay’s literary career started when he began writing poetry at an early age in his native Jamaica. In 1917, he published two poems in Seven Arts under the pen name Eli Edwards. Later in New York, when he was coeditor of the magazine The Liberator, he published one of his most famous poems, “If We Must Die” (1919), as well as essays and articles. A collection of McKay’s short stories as well as a nonfiction volume were published in Russian in the early 1920’s; English translations of these works did not appear until the late 1970’s. Gingertown, a collection of short stories, was published in 1932, and McKay also wrote two autobiographical books: A Long Way from Home (1937) and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His poems have been published in several collections. A memoir of his youth, My Green Hills of Jamaica, was not published until 1979, when it appeared with some of his short fiction in My Green Hills of Jamaica, and Five Jamaican Short Stories.

Selected Poems of Claude McKay is organized into five sections: “Songs for Jamaica,” “Baptism,” “Americana,” “Different Places,” and “Amoroso” (titles invented by the compilers). The first section contains several poems of reminiscence, such as “To One Coming North,” “Home Thoughts,” “I Shall Return,” the beautiful and affecting “Flame Heart,” and “The Tropics in New York,” with its concluding lines, “And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,/ I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.” The second section, which might have been titled “Baptism by Fire,” since it contains those protest poems that McKay wrote after his introduction to the racism and segregation that he discovered in New York, includes such well-known poems as “The Lynching,” “The Desolate City,” and “If We Must Die,” a poem that Winston Churchill recited in a speech during World War II (without knowing or acknowledging its author) and that became famous once more when a copy of it was discovered in the possession of one of the inmates during the uprising in the Attica State Prison in New York in 1971.

All these poems are fierce in their sentiments and show that the lyrical poet was also the revolutionary poet. Consider, for example, the opening lines of “Tiger”: “The white man is a tiger at my throat,/ Drinking my blood as my life ebbs away.” McKay’s condemnation extends to all who have fallen to hate, disrespect, or discrimination; in “The Wise Men of the East,” he says, “From the high place where erstwhile they grew drunk/ With power, oh God, how gutter-low have black men sunk!” It is this condemnation of all who have fallen below expectations and generally approved standards of behavior that differentiates McKay’s opprobrium from that of other, lesser black poets. He is not ready to condemn whites alone; rather, in the interests of a higher morality than the prevailing one, he calls all to reckoning.

Some of the poems in the “Americana” section are famous; “The Harlem Dancer” is perhaps the best of the twenty-one poems, depending for its melancholy effect on the dialectic between laughing male and female youths (the girls prostitutes, the boys “wine-flushed” and “bold-eyed”) and a graceful dancing girl, whose beautiful body is “devoured” with “eager, passionate gaze” while she has “grown lovelier for passing through a storm.” The poem presents with great poignancy the contrast between the “superior” Harlemites and the “inferior” dancing girl whose “self was not in that strange place.” Of McKay’s lyrics, many readers find this the most pleasing because of the extended metaphor of the “proudly-swaying palm” in the storm and the implicit superiority of the apparently inferior.

Those poems collected under the heading “Different Places” are not especially noteworthy except for “St. Isaac’s Church, Petrograd,” which opens with “Bow down my soul in worship very low/ And in the holy silences be lost.” This is the first suggestion that McKay’s early religious training had survived his interest in rationalism, socialism, and communism and that he was, fundamentally, a religious person, so that his ultimate conversion to Roman Catholicism was not really so astonishing. (Whether as a Catholic, a Baptist, or a member of some other denomination or sect is not really important, but McKay maintained his fundamental Christian beliefs throughout his sometimes tempestuous first forty years. His becoming a Roman Catholic, an act he termed a “right turn,” was in fact a matter of convenience when he was in poor health and almost in despair and was offered succor by Bishop Shiel of Chicago.) “Bow down before the marble Man of Woe,” he writes. “Bow down before the singing angel host.” McKay had gone to Moscow to participate in the activities of the Communist International, had met Leo Trotsky, and had been feted as an important black delegate; it is clear that this poem, written in 1922, bears a crucial relationship to McKay’s subsequent beliefs and life. Only after he had left Moscow (after a six-month stay) did he disclaim his earlier endorsement of communism; this one poem marks the point of change.

McKay’s later poems, called the “Cycle Poems” and still in manuscript in the Yale University Library, represent an apparent effort to please his Catholic benefactors, but they lack the spontaneity and depth of commitment of the great “St. Isaac’s Church, Petrograd,” which suggests the closing of the circle of belief.

The sense of being a black man in a white man’s world pervades McKay’s poetry, as does the sense of being a visionary in the land of the sightless—if not also the sense of being an alien (an islander) in the heart of the metropolis. As John Dewey noted, “I feel it decidedly out of place to refer to him as the voice of the Negro people; he is that, but he is so much more than that.” McKay is the voice of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the discriminated against; he is one of the major poetic voices of the Harlem Renaissance; he is one of a select group of poets who have represented the colonized peoples of the world; and he is one of the voices for universal self-respect and brotherhood.

Claude McKay was always considered a talented writer, and for a time during his youth and early adulthood, his literary output brought him fame and popularity. In 1912, when he was only twenty-three years old, the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences in Kingston awarded him a gold medal for his poetry published that year in two volumes, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. In 1922, as a representative of the American Workers Party, he attended the Third Communist International Conference in Moscow, Russia, and had the singular honor of addressing the assemblage. In 1928 he won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, presented by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), for his novel Home to Harlem. In 1937, when his memoir A Long Way from Home was published, he was the recipient of the James Weldon Johnson Literary Award.