Complete Poems Book

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.