Selected Poems

by Claude McKay

In his 1918 autobiographical essay, "A Negro Poet Writes," Claude McKay (1889–1948), reveals much about the wellspring of his poetry.
"I am a black man, born in Jamaica, B.W.I., and have been living in America for the last years. It was the first time I had ever come face to face with such manifest, implacable hate of my race, and my feelings were indescribable … Looking about me with bigger and clearer eyes I saw that this cruelty in different ways was going on all over the world. Whites were exploiting and oppressing whites even as they exploited and oppressed the yellows and blacks. And the oppressed, groaning under the leash, evinced the same despicable hate and harshness toward their weaker fellows. I ceased to think of people and things in the mass. [O]ne must seek for the noblest and best in the individual life each soul must save itself."
So wrote the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance, whose collection of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922), is widely regarded as having launched the movement. But McKay's literary significance goes far beyond his fierce condemnations of racial bigotry and oppression, as is amply demonstrated by the universal appeal of his sonnet, "If We Must Die," recited by Winston Churchill in a speech against the Nazis in World War II.
While in Jamaica, McKay produced two works of dialect verse, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads , that were widely read on the island. In richly authentic dialect, the poet evoked the folksongs and peasant life of his native country. The present volume, meticulously edited and with an introduction by scholar Joan R. Sherman, includes a representative selection of this dialect verse, as well as uncollected poems, and a generous number in standard English from Harlem Shadows .

Genres: Poetry, Classics, African American, Fiction, American, Grad School, Race

64 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1969

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

[Tea · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE BEST POET OF ALL TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Literally the best poetry that has ever graced my eyes! Truly powerful. His talent for lyricism almost appears supernatural! I love it. You MUST read this!!!!

[Jenna]

Like many, I first became aware of Claude McKay through his much-anthologized sonnet "If We Must Die," and was excited to learn his oeuvre contains many, many sonnets similarly powerful in the formal grandeur, emotional complexity, and bracing honesty with which they confront injustice, exploring how his feelings toward America commingle uneasy love with "holy hate." One especially thought-provoking sonnet appears to lament the appropriation of African American culture by "alien vandal mind[s]" that want to transplant African American spirituals to "garish marble hall[s] / Of faces hard with conscience-worried pride, / Like convicts witnessing a carnival." The sonnet "Poetry" ends with the fascinating couplet, "I fear, I fear my truly human heart / Will perish on the altar-stone of art!"

At the same time, it was enlightening to discover just how many other themes, moods, and styles are encompassed by McKay's oeuvre (apparently, he embraced Communism in mid life, but drifted away from those beliefs and converted to Catholicism in his final years) and interesting to find that, with regard to some of his poems reflecting on racial animus in America, he later commented, "I have written nothing similar to them since and don't think I ever shall again."

I hadn't expected a large fraction of the poems in this collection to be written in the dialect of McKay's native Jamaica (this book's introduction asserts that McKay was "the first poet to use Jamaican dialect"), and those poems written in dialect are striking for not only their musicality but also their thematic breadth: for example, there is a series of poems here called "Constab Ballads," written from the point-of-view of a disillusioned law enforcement officer ("But how do judge believe policemen, / Dem dutty mout' wid lyin' stain'?"). McKay prefaced these poems by saying, "I had not in me the stuff that goes to the making of a good constable; for I am so constituted that imagination outruns discretion, and it is my misfortune to have a most improper sympathy with wrongdoers."

Another side of McKay I liked seeing is that which comes to the fore in his numerous lyrics expressing his love for nature -- I was especially tickled to read the poems "Spring in New Hampshire" and "Summer Morn in New Hampshire," as I had always associated McKay primarily with New York City and hadn't realized he had spent time in northern New England.

[Lorraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Claude McKay's poems are lyrical, often brief, and always uncompromising in their observations on racism in the US, and the isolation blacks and immigrants experience. The poems break into a few general categories (and are roughly organized as such in the book) - wistful poems of his memories of Jamaica, angry/heartbroking poems about the urban American black experience, and lush, sexy poems about romantic love and travel. Lyricism and rhyme have consistently fallen out of favor in US poetry, so I'm not surprised that he's less known and taught in academia, but his voice should be more often heard in the classroom, I think.

Also interesting to note - the used copy I bought (which included a receipt from the last time it was purchased - 1978 - between its pages) came with a painfully racist biographical note from Max Eastman that made me want to crawl under a desk. He claimed to have been a good friend of Claude's for over 30 years, and I'm sure Max was sincere in thinking that they were indeed good friends. But Claude's poetry tells a story of a man unlikely to have accepted the overbearing racism of whites around him, "friend" or no...oh, to have been a fly on the wall at the office of the Liberator...

[Johan Thilander]

Ett litet urval från McKays dikt, från hans jamaicanska sånger till hans dikter från den harlemska renässansen. Som bäst är han i sina arga, hantverksmässigt skickliga verser:

O, to pull the thing to pieces! O to wreck it all and smash
With the power and the will that only holy hate can give;
Even though our broken bodies may be caught in the crash -
Even so - that children unborn may live!

Sidenote: Köpte denna samtidigt som jag köpte Harlem Unbound, en sourcebook till rollspelet Call of Cthulhu som behandlar just The Harlem Renaissance.

[Betty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Claude McKay, according to information in this book, is a lyricist extraordinaire among poets, that probably being due to his sensitivity and sentimentality to his surroundings. Despite his physical and mental adventurousness, McKay had a tender, easily wounded heart, needing "courage" to make the necessary human connections to enjoy "love and life". He was considerably imaginative, imagining away urban ugliness, remembering "unforgettable" love of a person or a place, and finding poetic irony in Oh wonderful is Broadway--only/ My heart, my heart is lonely. Those flights of imagination are engendered by something in the environment: "snow fairies", for example, made him remember and describe a dream of love on a winter's night. He has also a strongly spiritual nature, noting that agony is caused by loving, hoping, and pitying as "a pestilential city", but without the "Courage" to experience those with others one is also forgoing life. He has a strongly physical nature that must run its course but in the end allows him spiritual serenity.

The collection opens with poems about Jamaica, his happy home of which he calls "the island of the sea". Next, Baptism, is poems about his heritage. By now, he is encountering the different experience of America. Different Places spoke of his passionate feelings about "Moscow", Petrograd, "Barcelona", "Morocco", and "A Farewell to Morocco", the pleasure he found in those places, and Amoroso spoke of his memories of love from "Flirtation", "Polarity", perfumed night "Jasmine" to deeply serious poems about spiritual renewal ("Through Agony", "Thirst", "Courage"). His final stanza is

But in the socket-chiseled teeth of strife,
That gleam in serried files in all the lands,
We may join hungry, understanding hands,
And drink our share of ardent love and life.

McKay writes the poems from his experiences that his imagination transforms in his "eternal quest" to rest the body and to enjoy the spirit. He narrates those passages of life in these poem stories.

[JMJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

McKay is an incredible poet and this selection was perfect for showing his versatility and giving an overall impression of the causes for which he fought. The only reason I gave this collection four stars is that I didn’t enjoy those from Constab Ballads, but that was entirely a personal preference.

[Rosa Jamali · Rating 5 out of 5]

If We Must Die
Claude McKay

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Mc kay's poem in Harlem Renaissance tradition is a nostalgic piece of reminiscence of the past and again is a poem of the collective unconscious. The language is not filled with much of imagination or tropes but it's passionate and touching. The poem doesn't have a personal tone but encouragingly talking to a group of comrades and wants them to get united and fight against the oppressors.

[James F · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Jamaican-born poet who was a major influence on the Harlem Renaissance; this is a slight selection out of his more than 300 poems. After reading these, I intend to get his Complete Poems, either through the library or by buying them on Amazon. There are selections from his two books written in Jamaica in 1912, the year before he came to the U.S. (Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads) and from his later collection, Harlem Shadows, as well as some which were not collected previously. The subjects include love poems, poems about Jamaica, and poems dealing with racism and oppression in both countries. All are worth reading.

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love poems, revolutionary poems, work in multiple dialects, what's not to like here? Claude McKay definitely one of my all time favorite writers.

[Roseann Lloyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once I had a paperback copy of Selected Poems but I've lost it... so I bought the Kindle version to re-read.
Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay was a Jamaican-American writer and poet, who was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
My interest comes from the discovery that someone read one of Claude McKay's poems at my grandfather's funeral and none of my relatives remember which one it was. (My mother didn't allow me to go to funerals, as I was only 12. Strange rule, yes, but this is not the place for therapy.) What a strange coincidence to have a poem by an African-American poet read at a funeral in a segregated church and city, without naming the poet and title in the bulletin.

I'm enjoying my re-read of Selected Poems. It's a mixture of Jamaican speech, which takes time for me to figure out, (as I've been to Jamaica only once)... and rhyming poems like the ones my grandmother read to me when I was 5. As I read, I look for the one that was read a loud. The book introduction talks about his life in various countries, his injuries that caused disability, his life as a gay man, early in the century.

I recommend the book for people who are interested in "all the Englishes" !

[Tom Romig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claude McKay's poetry reflects his peripatetic and often anguished life. Though his Harlem Shadows is often cited as a key book in the launching of the Harlem Renaissance, he lived as an outsider, being Jamaican by birth, black in America, and bisexual in an intolerant time. He was radicalized in his 20s by the racism he experienced in America, not only what he underwent personally but what was rampant in the times--the East Saint Louis massacre, Greenwood, lynchings, and Jim Crow. His initial leaning towards Communism dissipated as he saw the movement descend into totalitarianism.

This representative selection of poems starts with early works in Jamaican dialect chosen from Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. They embody both the vibrancy and the tribulations of the people and the place and of his personal experiences, particularly his fraught time as a constable. Following is a selection of uncollected poems. The collection then offers many poems from the seminal Harlem Shadows.

[Christina Helregel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will start by saying I’m not a huge fan of poetry in general, so 3 stars is actually pretty good coming from me. There were a few poems I really loved in this collection: the apple-woman’s complaint, the dominant white, the capitalist at dinner, North and south, and enslaved. Overall, I really liked the progression of the collection and how it was linear. If you like poetry, you should definitely read this. I will keep trying to like it, because one day I’m sure I’ll find something I love about poetry. Right?

[Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone who's repeatedly tried his hand at sonnets, I really appreciated McKay's mastery of meter and rich use of language, not to mention the harsh sting he brings in his poems confronting racism head on. Who said the sonnet had to be about love? Why shouldn't it confront hate too? Which isn't to say McKay doesn't sometimes versify about love (he does) or that he only writes sonnets (he doesn't). He also happens to be an incredibly fine writer of pastoral poems too.

[Lou Elusiveink · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this! Reading McKay's poetry made me feel like I got poetry. He has a way of writing lines and couplets that just really hit you, and his poetry can be truly gut-wrenching at times. However, I feel like much of his work - especially his Songs of Jamaica - really need to be heard, not read.

I recommend this whether you are new to poetry or well versed (haha) in the classics! I'm definitely interested in reading more from the Harlem Renaissance.

[Jack Heller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of what I had known of Claude McKay's poetry were poems from his "Baptism" collection which were in protest of lynching and violations of civil rights. Those are his most famous poems, deservedly so. However, this collection shows McKay as a poet of nature, romance, and places, at least as much so as the protest poems. He uses the sonnet form often, and one of his most common words is "Oh." While not what I had expected, I am glad to have read this volume.

[BB]

I really enjoyed it though his earliest poems were harder to understand because of the Jamaican dialect. I liked the topics discussed among those being capitalism , race, romance , and nature.
Some of my favorites were
- jasmine
- bennie’s departure/ consolation
-the dominant white
- a capitalist at dinner
- my mother
-outcast
- I know my soul
- exhortation
-Sukee river

[Karl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good collection of poems reflecting Claude McKay's personal life and his responses to poverty, racism, his sense of exile, and his alienation.

The poems I liked best were:
“My Native Land, My Home”
“Bennie’s Departure”
“Home Thoughts”
“After the Winter”
“When I Have Passed Away”
“Winter in the Country”
“The Tired Worker”
“Outcast”
“If We Must Die”
“Poetry”

[Jacub]

Not Rating because I have read a majority of the poems earlier in the year. The new ones I read are not enough to justify a rating!

Had to read for a class and I love love love McKay!

In my favorite poets like oh my god, the power this man has to evoke emotions from me!

Everyone must read some McKay in their lifetime eventually..

[Natalie Coleman · Rating 4 out of 5]

In reading this book, I found out and read many things that I did not know. I love McKay’s grand style of writing and his lyrical persuasion of words. His words struck chords in me and I enjoyed this book immensely.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

My copy is the old HBJ edition with the more than slightly racist intro by McKay's good friend Max Eastman. Odd how things have changed.

It was good to spend some real time with McKay, rather than simply reading a poem or two in anthologies. Yes, he was an immaculate sonneteer, but the other forms were gently handled too. He really was learned in the forms and had an ear he was right to trust.

The startling thing about the poems for me is that he was so unrelenting in calling out white people for their racism, even back in the early 20s. There is, of course, the famous poem from "Baptism," "If We must Die," which is pretty harrowing once you remove it from, say, Winston Churchill quoting it. But then there are the other poems there that are unforgiving. "To the White Fiends,"

Think you I could not arm me with a gun
And shoot down ten of you for every one
Of my black brothers you murdered, burnt by you?

Wow! And that poem is one of many. For white folks to be confronted by their whiteness, we could start with McKay!

Later poems, as he looked for his place in Europe and North Africa are interesting, but don't have the edge of these early Harlem Renaissance poems. The last poems here are love poems, and they get more interesting if I imagine them as gay love poems, although he was careful to disguise his orientation, if indeed he was gay.

But the reading is much more interesting than a simple historical dive. These are poems that continue to resonate, and are perhaps more important now than they have been for a few years.

[Doctor Sax · Rating 4 out of 5]

Claude McKay, "The Harlem Dancer" (1922)

Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes
And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players upon a picnic day.
She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,
The light gauze hanging loose about her form;
To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.
Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curls
Luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise,
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,
Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze;
But looking at her falsely-smiling face,
I knew her self was not in that strange place.

Claude McKay - "The Harlem Dancer" was originally printed in Claude McKay's book Harlem Shadows which was a collection of poems 'Harlem Shadows" and "The Harlem Dancer" being McKay's most famous. Harlem Shadows was published in 1922 by Harcourt, Brace and Company NYC N.Y.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

During the Twenties, McKay was one of the most prominent members of the Harlem Renaissance, and in his later years he was a well-known figure in American letters, in part because of his poem “If We Must Die,” his response to the Harlem race riots of 1919, which became a World War II rallying cry. If only his adopted country, America, had fed him more than the “bread of bitterness,” perhaps the poet’s range would have reached above the lower octaves of versified dysphoria and homicidal rage. In typical revolutionary style, McKay has unlaced the corseted, lady-like sonnet of the English Romantics and made it dance gracefully with “light gauze hanging loose about her form” like the young prostitute in “The Harlem Dancer” in this gritty version of a black man’s experience in the white man’s society.

Favorite Poems:
“America”
“The Harlem Dancer”
“The White City”

[Rosa Jamali · Rating 5 out of 5]

If We Must Die
Claude McKay

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Mc kay's poem in Harlem Renaissance tradition is a nostalgic piece of reminiscence of the past and again is a poem of the collective unconscious. The language is not filled with much of imagination or tropes but it's passionate and touching. The poem doesn't have a personal tone but encouragingly talking to a group of comrades and wants them to get united and fight against the oppressors.

[Kari]

My dry review for a selection of sometimes gut-wrenching, sometimes beautiful, and sometimes bustling poems by Claude McKay:

Known for “If We Must Die” this book of poems will not disappoint with a selection of works torn from the same theme, but also included are poems about place, memory, and love. In particular the ones about life in NYC that are interwoven with memories of Jamaica were some of my favorites.

[Matt Seiple · Rating 3 out of 5]

"If We Must Die" remains one of my favorite poems - if this book were just that poem, it would receive 5 stars. Since I can't really speak for the others (haven't given them nearly as many readings), I'll mark it down to 3...

[Jeremy Hicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fiery and often moving collection of poems from my favorite poet, Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay. He's lesser known than his contemporaries but no less talented. Check him out. He's the man Churchill quoted when he wanted to inspire the British populace during the dark days of WW2.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great poet, heartfelt and emotional. This book is a little slim though; I didn't realise it was a thrifty edition. The type and general production is quite cheap, and the poetry collection quite small. I need to get the 'Complete Poems' next time.

[Shiv · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really great read. Powerful poems. Some of my favorites are "Thirst," "Jasmines," "Birds of Prey," and "America" just to name a few but there are plenty more. Definitely give it a read. I look forward to go back and reading it many times. I'm glad to have it in my collection.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm blown away by McKay's bio -- and these poems are adored by me as much as he is.

[Dayna Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic selection of poetry from this classic African American poet.