Claude McKay. Complete Poems

African American Review, Summer, 2006 by Gary E. Holcomb

Claude McKay. Complete Poems. Ed. William J. Maxwell. American Poetry Recovery Series. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2004. 464 pp. $40.00.

Despite his reputation as the first Afro-Caribbean poet to write dialect poetry, as well as recognition for a few other categorical black firsts credits, Claude McKay remained until recent years a somewhat remote figure, particularly when arranged alongside such Harlem Renaissance leading lights as Du Bois, Hughes, and Hurston. Scholars presently are reassessing the poet through fertile new critical modes, however, and William J. Maxwell's gathering of McKay's Complete Poems, issued by the University of Illinois Press's American Poetry Recovery Series, materially enhances the cur rent flurry over the New Negro author. Complete Poems is a volume that no student of the Harlem Renaissance, the leftist interwar period, dissident sexuality studies, the Catholic worker movement, or negritude, diaspora, and Caribbean language literature can live without. Maxwell's extensively annotated collection assembles all four of McKay's verse volumes, namely, his early Jamaican collections, Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912), the initially London-published Spring in New Hampshire (1920), and the poet's most spectacular assortment, Harlem Shadows (1922). Amassing over 300 poems, Maxwell's collection organizes each of McKay's lyrics according to the date of its composition, comprising "eighty-seven previously unpublished ... and sixty-one uncollected works" (xi), thereby giving a more coherent sense of McKay's poetic trajectory than was feasible without access to scattered archives. Until now, McKay's verse has been, as Maxwell says, "a poetry in hiding" (xix).

Drawing McKay's orphan poetry out of the shadows, however, obliges more than merely collecting overlooked works between covers for the first time: "Confronting [McKay's] poetry as a whole offers two sorts of productive novelty: discovery and recontextualization" (xxiii). Complete Poems gainsays several lingering assumptions about McKay's lyric effort, beginning with the misconception that the author abandoned writing poetry during the mid-1920s in favor of composing exclusively in prose. Starting in the 1920s and for each decade of his life thereafter, the New Negro poet generated canto-like thematic verse sequences. Laid up to recover from a toxic treatment for a venereal disease, McKay produced the previously unpublished Baudelaire-inflected cluster he titled "The Clinic" around 1923. "The Clinic" includes the subsequently published "The Desolate City" (1926), a poem that not only visits the blistered territory of The Waste Land (1922), but also looks forward to his next verse cycle. Known for venting his spleen, McKay generated the subsequent thematic batch, the "Cities" poems, around 1934, a grouping that Maxwell perfectly describes as "one of the most polemical, most resentful, and most candidly oddball sonnet cycles in twentieth-century literature" (xxiv). And the one-time bard of black Marxism produced the even more choleric anti-Communist, pro-Catholic sequence, "The Cycle," circa 1943, 20 years after he has been generally thought to be through with writing poetry. Indeed, rescuing McKay's neglected verse proposes a more ambitious project than even the vital work of retrieving the poetry of a major author: "This book's 323 poems ... aim to close the largest remaining gap in our evolving portrait of Claude McKay--and arguably the largest remaining gap in the historical record of black diasporan poetry as well" (xxii).

In addition to superb recovery work, Maxwell contributes the dividend of an alert, independent critical mind. "Claude McKay--Lyric Poetry in the Age of Cataclysm," Maxwell's lively introduction, brings a clearheaded reevaluation to McKay studies, starting with the insistent vexation over the poet's resolve to work in traditional forms. After his two Kingston collections of poetry McKay never again rendered into verse the basilectal creole speech of his native home, Clarendon Parish, and police beat, Spanish Town, Kingston. By choosing this course, McKay effectively decided against producing vernacular poetry at a time when versifying black idiomatic language and the folk fable was so much in vogue: the New Negro Renaissance. Nor did he generally take up related black modernist language experimentation techniques--free verse, blues, and jazz prosody--as did other New Negro poets, like Hughes and Sterling Brown. As those acquainted with "one of the landmark political poems of the twentieth century" (xxi), "If We Must Die" (1919), have probably already gathered, McKay's favored lyric form was the sonnet. Because of his supposedly stubbornly retrogressive style and for a few other reasons, critics have portrayed the author as a contradictory figure in black literary arts. But this persistent conceit about McKay's presumed retrograde aesthetic overlooks the poet's momentous literary cultural work, a dialect(ical) of modernism that Maxwell limns as the black author's "progressive, internationalizing impulse" (xxxi).