Claude McKay Walks in Ferguson
[An edited and reduced version of this piece was published at The Critical Flame.]
At the start of my first book, Embodiment & Release, is a pair of two quotations, one by M.I. Finley in which he discusses the status of freedom in antiquity, the other by José Clemente Orozco in which he compliments freedom of the press as he found it in the United States.
The book closes with the words, “Go forth, go forth!” by the poet Claude McKay. As I recall, McKay like Orozco came to the United States for the purpose of studying agriculture—each went on to other things.
McKay’s own influence on my early work is outstanding. Not the earliest, as in that first compilation; but by the time my second book, a book of sonnets, came to be written, the impact of McKay is clearly distinguishable. Throughout, phrases hark back to things he wrote. Intentional echoes, in motif and sometimes actual phrasing, abound. It is not surprising: of the generations of “l’entre deux guerres,” McKay is the first clear master of the sonnet. Yeats had turned out one or two earlier—one a classic—same with Pound; Cummings wrote lots, but, for various idiosyncrasies of style they cannot be considered; Wilfred Owen, if he had lived, might have rivaled (he was disposed to the sonnet and masterful in its usage) but the only other serious contender would be Edna St. Vincent Millay.
In Sonnets, I was settling debts, and setting myself up as a self-appointed scorekeeper. Though she, with the rise of “Neo Formulism” in academia, has been rehabilitated since, back then—more than two decades ago—Millay was routinely excluded from literary anthologies, as was McKay, possibly excepting his sonnet “If We Must Die.” I wanted to set things right, with sonnets such as (25):
“More precious is the light,” so wrote Millay,
Better than half a dozen poets not
Ever excluded, as she is today
From compilations, and her work forgot.
These are the scholars making their decisions,
Based on what motives, do you dare to ask,
Subjecting work that’s good to rank derisions,
In glory mediocre stuff to bask.
These hombres necios is who they are,
Anthologists discretely shaping our
Legacy to the future, in their care,
Through ignorance or else abuse of power.
But we that know, we honor thee, Millay,
No matter what the literati say.
And, more pertinently (9):
It’s scarcely recognized that Claude McKay
Of all the poets of his generation
Except for Wilfred Owen, wrote the best
(And he Jamaica born!) iambic line,
Pentameter of pleasant modulation,
While this and that, like Eliot, professed
It an outmoded fashion, like some wine
“Not suited for the taste of present day.”
But so it goes; and look at the successors
Of Eliot—their verse is all a mess!--
No fault of his, all mutually admiring
Each other’s spewage, calling it “finesse,”
And “poetry” and “verse,” the lot conspiring
To keep the lie concealed from their assessors.
In a review of Sonnets at Expansive Poetry Online, attention was drawn to the line “Pentameter of pleasant modulation” with an affirmation; yet the review later mistakenly suggested that all my sonnets were “in only one mode”, or “Elizabethan” in form. This was not the case. Number 9 was done in a sonnet form which, to the best of my knowledge, McKay himself invented. At least I have not found prior examples of it.
This kind of technical innovation is—in the small world of poetry—a big deal. To give you some sense of the cachet involved, an author publishing today has a Wikipedia mention of a sonnet form which he invented—never mind its aesthetic incompetence—which is boasted as something of a feather in his cap. So why the neglect of McKay? If he invented a new form, his is organic—a balanced form that retains the octet/sestet division, yet with the same number of paired rhymes as the Shakespearean—avoiding the quadruple rhymes of the Petrarchan.
It is a sonnet style made for the English language. So, for example, McKay has:
This kind of technical innovation is—in the small world of poetry—a big deal. To give you some sense of the cachet involved, an author publishing today has a Wikipedia mention of a sonnet form which he invented—never mind its aesthetic incompetence—which is boasted as something of a feather in his cap. So why the neglect of McKay? If he invented a new form, his is organic—a balanced form that retains the octet/sestet division, yet with the same number of paired rhymes as the Shakespearean—avoiding the quadruple rhymes of the Petrarchan.
It is a sonnet style made for the English language. So, for example, McKay has:
Moscow
Moscow for many loving her was dead...
And yet I saw a bright Byzantine fair,
Of jewelled buildings, pillars, domes and spires
Of hues prismatic dazzling to the sight;
A glory painted on the Eastern air,
Of amorous sounding tones like passionate lyres;
All colors laughing richly their delight
And reigning over all the color red.
My memory bears engraved the high-walled Kremlin,
Of halls symbolic of the tiger will,
Of Czarist instruments of mindless law...
And often now my nerves throb with the thrill
When, in that gilded place, I felt and saw
The presence and the simple voice of Lenin.
Relatively few of McKay’s sonnets were done in this form—mainly travelogues—while his heightened classics are traditional mode; yet why was the invention—if it belongs to McKay—not considered noteworthy? Why was it not written about? Even the 2008 Complete Poems makes no mention of it.
The answer, I believe, lies with racial discrimination. Even at the time, McKay was aware of his handicap. He wrote to Max Eastman in 1942:
The answer, I believe, lies with racial discrimination. Even at the time, McKay was aware of his handicap. He wrote to Max Eastman in 1942:
You should be aware that the chief reason why I have not had a job equal to my intellectual attainments is simply because I have no close academic associates nor college degree, and also I am a Negro. My racial group is even more than the white, narrow and hidebound about college qualifications. I know many persons in it who are not very capable, but have good jobs because they were graduates of Harvard and Yale and Columbia.
If whites, at that time, were less “narrow and hidebound about... qualifications”, that is no longer the case. The world of academia no longer divides so neatly on racial lines, yet fundamental disparities inhere that go a long way toward explaining the relative obscurity in which McKay’s work has been allowed to languish. That and—possibly—given the divide between academically sanctioned and popular poetry, that of McKay glides easily into the popular realm. Some of the most-read poets—Kipling and Service spring to mind—have been the least studied.
The stranglehold of academia on literary voices is now nearly complete: it is not even so much about who holds which credential (though that figures prominently) as what topics may legitimately be spoken about. Remember, in our day—in America—higher education has become in essence the handmaiden to the military-industrial complex, or more accurately, the military-industrial-congressional complex. As a consequence, genuine achievements, such as those of McKay, are relegated to the backwaters of oblivion whereas artificial achievements are paraded and puffed up as though significant.
This is especially pernicious in the minor field of professional “Neo Formulaic” poetry: if it has become a truism that free verse--vers libre—is nothing but chopped up prose, it is becoming equally evident that much written both scannable and rhymed is not poetry. That is the dirty little secret of academic poetry regardless camp and—indeed—regardless academic affiliation.
In his 50s, after a decade of illness, McKay sought to put an end to his financial difficulties by taking on employment as a riveter—something he was not physically equipped to handle, and which surely contributed to a stroke at age 53. Previously he had turned down a “sizeable” book advance, explaining, “I haven’t been able to concentrate on a plot. It’s quite impossible when one’s mind is distracted. People can’t realize the state of one’s mind under such conditions, and the few I meet make me angry by telling me how happy I look.”
If you are going to get a book by McKay, the one to seek out is his Selected Poems first published in 1953, several years after his death. In the newer edition (the one I have) a biographical note by Max Eastman has been moved to the fore as an introduction; previously it was an addendum and the text opened with a lackluster essay by John Dewey which has silently been removed to no ill-effect. With what McKay’s biographer Wayne Cooper refers to as an “unconscious condescension” (and correctly so), Eastman begins:
The stranglehold of academia on literary voices is now nearly complete: it is not even so much about who holds which credential (though that figures prominently) as what topics may legitimately be spoken about. Remember, in our day—in America—higher education has become in essence the handmaiden to the military-industrial complex, or more accurately, the military-industrial-congressional complex. As a consequence, genuine achievements, such as those of McKay, are relegated to the backwaters of oblivion whereas artificial achievements are paraded and puffed up as though significant.
This is especially pernicious in the minor field of professional “Neo Formulaic” poetry: if it has become a truism that free verse--vers libre—is nothing but chopped up prose, it is becoming equally evident that much written both scannable and rhymed is not poetry. That is the dirty little secret of academic poetry regardless camp and—indeed—regardless academic affiliation.
In his 50s, after a decade of illness, McKay sought to put an end to his financial difficulties by taking on employment as a riveter—something he was not physically equipped to handle, and which surely contributed to a stroke at age 53. Previously he had turned down a “sizeable” book advance, explaining, “I haven’t been able to concentrate on a plot. It’s quite impossible when one’s mind is distracted. People can’t realize the state of one’s mind under such conditions, and the few I meet make me angry by telling me how happy I look.”
If you are going to get a book by McKay, the one to seek out is his Selected Poems first published in 1953, several years after his death. In the newer edition (the one I have) a biographical note by Max Eastman has been moved to the fore as an introduction; previously it was an addendum and the text opened with a lackluster essay by John Dewey which has silently been removed to no ill-effect. With what McKay’s biographer Wayne Cooper refers to as an “unconscious condescension” (and correctly so), Eastman begins:
Claude McKay was most widely known perhaps as a novelist, author of Home to Harlem, a national best-seller in 1928. But he will live in history as the first great lyric genius that his race produced.
This is the piece to which I referred in my sonnet number 8:
My only wish, which I may not attain,
Years hence when my poems bound and printed are
That I may have an introduction written
For them like what Max Eastman wrote for thine,
So generous and sweet, so full of care,
Wherefore “the mind was wrung, the pencil bitten,”
Instead of some encomium more fine,
Sententious in its praise, to pay for pain.
This I may never have, because my life
Lacks all the grace and generosity
Of thine, dear Claude. In meanness pass my days
Each than the last more odious to me,
And fever-fits no spoken word allays
But plunge me further headlong into strife.
I am now approaching the age at which McKay suffered his final throes—indeed my circumstances are different: I lack a coterie of friends like Max Eastman willing to take an interest in my affairs, academically I am no less shut out than he, but a crucial factor weighs heavily in favor of my longevity: my skin tone is white.
Eastman’s profile concludes with two poignant paragraphs:
Eastman’s profile concludes with two poignant paragraphs:
After a year in Russia Claude went back to France and down to Morocco to live quietly and write books that had little to do with socialism. But he did not conceal his contempt for the increasingly ruthless tyranny over man’s mind and body that he saw growing out of the great revolution that had lifted him so high. He was not sucked in by the “racial democracy” for which so many of Stalin’s American fellow-travelers were willing to trade the substance of freedom for any man, black or white.
His last years were passed in sickness; he could not write much; and he was destitute. One word on the communist side would have brought him ease, comfort, contemporary fame and a good income. But he would not speak it. He chose instead to live in penury, and watch his fame and popularity gradually disappear from the earth. A few years more and he would have seen them rise again, for his choice was as correct as it was courageous, and his place in the world’s literature is unique and is assured.
The poem more than any other which clinched McKay’s fame is “If We Must Die”
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
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!
The occasion was the infamous “Red Summer” of 1919. What began early in the year as a series of terrorist attacks purportedly by communists—mail bombs were sent to a variety of governmental and business figures—by summer agitation had morphed into a series of riots against blacks. A report by George E. Haynes, published in October of that year, identified 34 such instances across the country. In many cities, attacks against blacks were spearheaded by uniformed whites: military or police officials. Rioting in Chicago—considered the bloodiest of the season—was facilitated as those in authority refrained from acting (from “serving and protecting” as we would say now). Carl Sandburg described it:
The so-called race riots in Chicago during the last week of July, 1919, started on a Sunday at a bathing beach. A colored boy swam across an imaginary segregation line. White boys threw rocks at him and knocked him off a raft. He was drowned. Colored people rushed to a policeman and asked for the arrest of the boys throwing stones. The policeman refused. As the dead body of the drowned boy was being handled, more rocks were thrown, on both sides. The policeman held on to his refusal to make arrests. Fighting then began that spread to all the borders of the Black Belt. The score at the end of three days was recorded as twenty negroes dead, fourteen white men dead, and a number of negro houses burned.
Sandburg’s figures were low: it is now believed 38 people had died by the time rioting was quelled, of which 23 were black. Illinois Attorney General Edward Brundage and State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne gathered evidence for a Grand Jury investigation. “On August 4, 1919, seventeen indictments against African Americans were handed down.” (Wiki)
The summer of 1919 has been referred to as the first occasion when blacks en masse defended themselves against mob violence: they fought back. Cameron McWhirter’s book Red Summer is subtitled “the awakening of Black America” pointing to the political cohesion and will which was forged at that time. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of black soldiers returned from fighting in Europe: “By the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.”
McKay himself personally did not see any violence; he did not even especially identify with the American Negro. That summer, however, the identification was forced; McKay had greatness thrust upon him. Wayne Cooper writes:
The summer of 1919 has been referred to as the first occasion when blacks en masse defended themselves against mob violence: they fought back. Cameron McWhirter’s book Red Summer is subtitled “the awakening of Black America” pointing to the political cohesion and will which was forged at that time. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of black soldiers returned from fighting in Europe: “By the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.”
McKay himself personally did not see any violence; he did not even especially identify with the American Negro. That summer, however, the identification was forced; McKay had greatness thrust upon him. Wayne Cooper writes:
The poem eloquently expressed black America’s mood of desperation and defiance that summer. McKay had first read the poem to the men of his dining-car crew. They had reacted with intense emotion. Even the irresponsible fourth waiter, a man afflicted with “a strangely acute form of satyriasis,” had wept. [...] McKay had written a poem that immediately won a permanent place in the memory of a beleaguered people. Because of it, American blacks embraced him and have ever since claimed him as one of their own. “Indeed,” McKay eventually concluded, “that one grand outburst is their sole standard of appraising my poetry.” White America has remained less impressed.
The poem is reputed to have been read by Winston Churchill before the House of Commons during World War II; alternately, the locale is given as before the American Congress. In either case, the prime minister and paragon of white supremacy was not troubled by its author’s race; the poem does not immediately pronounce itself as about the black experience. More recently, with protest marches in Ferguson and elsewhere around the country, in response to numerous egregious “death while black and unarmed” incidents perpetrated by white law enforcement officials (widely reported, in some cases with accompanying viral video), the poem has had something of a resurgence. Recitations have been posted on YouTube: black America does not forget its origins.
A year before that summer, McKay explained his outlook:
A year before that summer, McKay explained his outlook:
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 lash, evinced the same despicable hate and harshness toward their weaker fellows. I ceased to think of people and things in the mass—why should I fight with mad dogs only to be bitter and probably transformed into a mad dog myself? I turned to the individual soul, the spiritual leaders, for comfort and consolation. I felt and still feel that one must seek for the noblest and best in the individual life only: each soul must save itself.
This thought is echoed in his poetry:
The Negro’s Friend
There is no radical the Negro’s friend
Who points some other than the classic road
For him to follow, fighting to the end,
Thinking to ease him of one half his load.
What waste of time to cry: "No Segregation!"
When it exists in stark reality,
Both North and South, throughout this total nation,
The state decreed by white authority.
Must fifteen million blacks be gratified,
That one of them can enter as a guest,
A fine white house—the rest of them denied
A place of decent sojourn and a rest?
Oh, Segregation is not the whole sin,
The Negroes need salvation from within.
Yet McKay saw starkly his own predicament.
Outcast
For the dim regions whence my fathers came
My spirit, bondaged by the body, longs.
Words felt, but never heard, my lips would frame;
My soul would sing forgotten jungle songs.
I would go back to darkness and to peace,
But the great western world holds me in fee,
And I may never hope for full release
While to its alien gods I bend my knee.
Something in me is lost, forever lost,
Some vital thing has gone out of my heart,
And I must walk the way of life a ghost
Among the sons of earth, a thing apart.
For I was born, far from my native clime,
Under the white man's menace, out of time.
Many of his poems do not deal directly with the racial question; in others, it looms a shadow, just out of sight.
McKay’s earliest poems were dialect poems, written while he was still in Jamaica. Some precedent existed for that kind of writing: Robert Burns, most famously; Paul Laurence Dunbar, born eighteen years before McKay, and dead in 1906 at age 33, who grew to feel dialect writing his bane. What sets McKay apart—good though his dialect poems may be—unlike either Dunbar or Burns, when he turned to straight English, McKay produced not only credible lines but memorable ones. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that he “invented” the modern American iambic pentameter line. No other American writer of his day writes it with such smooth facility. (Some question exists as to whether or how much Max Eastman helped “shape” some of McKay’s lines, textual questions which were not addressed in the annotated Complete Poems as I recall. Eastman’s comment, recalling McKay’s whirlwind tour in communist Russia—feted and “entertained everywhere at the state’s expense”—surely applies no less to compositional method: “But his mind was in control.”)
McKay walked the weird bifurcated line of colonized subject yet assimilated citizen. In America he came into his own.
McKay’s earliest poems were dialect poems, written while he was still in Jamaica. Some precedent existed for that kind of writing: Robert Burns, most famously; Paul Laurence Dunbar, born eighteen years before McKay, and dead in 1906 at age 33, who grew to feel dialect writing his bane. What sets McKay apart—good though his dialect poems may be—unlike either Dunbar or Burns, when he turned to straight English, McKay produced not only credible lines but memorable ones. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that he “invented” the modern American iambic pentameter line. No other American writer of his day writes it with such smooth facility. (Some question exists as to whether or how much Max Eastman helped “shape” some of McKay’s lines, textual questions which were not addressed in the annotated Complete Poems as I recall. Eastman’s comment, recalling McKay’s whirlwind tour in communist Russia—feted and “entertained everywhere at the state’s expense”—surely applies no less to compositional method: “But his mind was in control.”)
McKay walked the weird bifurcated line of colonized subject yet assimilated citizen. In America he came into his own.
America
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
When I “borrowed” this last line for one of my own poems, “priceless” became “gaudy” but the structure remained his, and the reference was intentional. McKay was prescient beyond his contemporaries—only Eliot’s political vision rivals his, though possibly Pound’s did in portentousness.
Eastman writes:
Eastman writes:
Claude was born in 1890 in a little thatched farm house of two rooms in the hilly middle country of Jamaica in the West Indies. He learned in childhood how a family of his ancestors, brought over in chains from Madagascar, had kept together by declaring a death strike on the auction block. Each would kill himself, they vowed solemnly, if they were sold to separate owners. With the blood of such rebels in his veins, and their memory to stir it, Claude McKay grew up proud of his race and with no disposition to apologize for his color.
It is an interesting vignette, apocryphal or no—for what it shows of McKay’s character as well as of Eastman’s interpretation of it. The cultural ferment of the twenties was remarkable; McKay, just in his thirties, stands in relationship to the Harlem Renaissance in similar apposition as Dante to the Italian Renaissance: he antedates it, and by the time it came to full flower, he had largely left the scene.
Opposite forces, at loggerheads with one another, have resulted in McKay’s work being less well known than it should be: I speak of the politics of the university English department. Poetry has gone from dwelling in the “public domain” so to speak, to becoming the especial purview of degreed professors. Furthermore, in Richard Wilbur’s phrase, “[t]here is a thoroughly crazy recent idea, sometimes held by bright people, that we have put meter and rhyme forever behind us”. An idea so “thoroughly crazy” should not have much traction; yet university cliques have marshaled force against it.
An entire book to that purpose, written by Timothy Steele (noted by X.J. Kennedy as “among the most eminent and most respected of the... poets dubbed the New Formalists” and “the best critic that the movement has produced”) speaks to the matter. In Missing Measures, Steele envisions a former age of uniform standards for literature:
Opposite forces, at loggerheads with one another, have resulted in McKay’s work being less well known than it should be: I speak of the politics of the university English department. Poetry has gone from dwelling in the “public domain” so to speak, to becoming the especial purview of degreed professors. Furthermore, in Richard Wilbur’s phrase, “[t]here is a thoroughly crazy recent idea, sometimes held by bright people, that we have put meter and rhyme forever behind us”. An idea so “thoroughly crazy” should not have much traction; yet university cliques have marshaled force against it.
An entire book to that purpose, written by Timothy Steele (noted by X.J. Kennedy as “among the most eminent and most respected of the... poets dubbed the New Formalists” and “the best critic that the movement has produced”) speaks to the matter. In Missing Measures, Steele envisions a former age of uniform standards for literature:
Today, in the absence of agreed upon standards of versification, poetry is often judged exclusively with respect to its intentions or subject matter. Frequently, poets characterize themselves or are characterized by critics according to political views or ethnic backgrounds or sexual preferences. Poets are thus classified as “ecologists,” “feminists,” “gay activists,” “native Americans,” “black poets,” and so forth. Under this rubric, writers who adopt meter are given their own little label— “formalists.” It is good that poets should write of issues and causes that they believe are important. Classifying poetry by the causes it addresses, however, trivializes meter: the practice confuses what is extrinsic to poetic structure with what it intrinsic to it.
While discounting subject matter, Steele asserts that one age is relatively on parity with any other:
We live in an age that is in many ways profoundly disturbing. But every age is difficult. When we look at the past, we do not (and in some cases do not have the opportunity to) look too closely. In consequence, we do not see that the sources for individual and collective unhappiness and unease exist in all times. One must admit and face the terrors of the day. But to say that we confront such unprecedentedly trying conditions that we are at liberty to abandon conventional restraint may be to commit an act of spiritual vanity. Those who tell us that we should write in a crazy fashion because our times are crazy may be inviting us to collaborate with the very forces that we should resist.
The “movement” depends on a “straw man” characterization of its opposition: when were any counseled “that we should write in a crazy fashion”? Certainly the modernists never advised any such thing. While McKay did not classify his verse under any “rubric,” yet his critics, or classifiers in academia, were not checked from doing so, particularly those that sought to minimize or deemphasize group-centric experience. McKay did address topics unique to his racial group:
Enslaved
Oh when I think of my long-suffering race,
For weary centuries despised, oppressed,
Enslaved and lynched, denied a human place
In the great life line of the Christian West;
And in the Black Land disinherited,
Robbed in the ancient country of its birth,
My heart grows sick with hate, becomes as lead,
For this my race that has no home on earth.
Then from the dark depths of my soul I cry
To the avenging angel to consume
The white man's world of wonders utterly:
Let it be swallowed up in earth's vast womb,
Or upward roll as sacrificial smoke
To liberate my people from its yoke!
Even without imputing to it a conscious belittling of “the Negro experience” about which McKay writes, academic structure strives to reduce literature to a level of sameness. An instructive apparatus interposes itself. As Elizabeth Sewell wrote, “A poet writes for people. He does not write for professors, English classes, textbooks, examination papers.” While any of these may contribute to “better understanding” of a poem, usually “something else happens: they come between the living man who writes poems and the living beings he writes for, with an icy, sterilizing, or just plain wearisome apparatus of technicality and scholarship.”
In particular, Steele’s comment that “[c]lassifying poetry by the causes it addresses... trivializes meter”, while not incorrect, yet speaks itself to the era of the university-sponsored creative writing workshop. For the value of literature, ultimately, rests with what is being spoken about, or primarily that, and only secondarily with the mechanism(s) whereby it is spoken. The plays of Shakespeare are not studied because of their author’s variations on the iambic pentameter line, but because of dramatic themes or situations and what these reveal about our mutual humanity (or, secondarily, the historical period).
The diminishment of subject matter, however, reduces varieties of suffering into one thing. A writer will be lauded as “a model of stylistic purity... simultaneously lucid and lively.” That is Steele on J.V. Cunningham, an academic poet given his sanction: “More specifically, [he] has in abundance that key technical facility for writing traditional verse. He can coordinate, naturally and flexibly, good grammar with meter, stanza, and rhyme. And he deserves the study of poets and critics for this, if for no other quality.” This without having anything much to say; whereas McKay, the force of his language drives immediately to the subject at hand (at times a disconcerting one to any audience, but perhaps most so to a white academic one):
In particular, Steele’s comment that “[c]lassifying poetry by the causes it addresses... trivializes meter”, while not incorrect, yet speaks itself to the era of the university-sponsored creative writing workshop. For the value of literature, ultimately, rests with what is being spoken about, or primarily that, and only secondarily with the mechanism(s) whereby it is spoken. The plays of Shakespeare are not studied because of their author’s variations on the iambic pentameter line, but because of dramatic themes or situations and what these reveal about our mutual humanity (or, secondarily, the historical period).
The diminishment of subject matter, however, reduces varieties of suffering into one thing. A writer will be lauded as “a model of stylistic purity... simultaneously lucid and lively.” That is Steele on J.V. Cunningham, an academic poet given his sanction: “More specifically, [he] has in abundance that key technical facility for writing traditional verse. He can coordinate, naturally and flexibly, good grammar with meter, stanza, and rhyme. And he deserves the study of poets and critics for this, if for no other quality.” This without having anything much to say; whereas McKay, the force of his language drives immediately to the subject at hand (at times a disconcerting one to any audience, but perhaps most so to a white academic one):
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.
Academics of Steele’s clique view the composition of verse that is correctly metered and without obvious grammatical errors as something worthy of study in and of itself; touching upon content may raise difficult issues. Difficulty, as Steele says, is relative, so no reason to probe it too deeply.
(Cunningham does not figure largely into my argument; yet to give you a sense of his accomplishment, he is touted for a terse, epigrammatic style—so you find Dryden’s couplet
(Cunningham does not figure largely into my argument; yet to give you a sense of his accomplishment, he is touted for a terse, epigrammatic style—so you find Dryden’s couplet
Here lies my wife: here let her lie!
Now she’s at rest, and so am I.
“improved” in Cunningham’s treatment to
Here lies my wife. Eternal peace
Be to us both with her decease.
This is supposed to be worth studying because the elements of grammar, meter and rhyme are “well coordinated”.)
Yet Steele and his clique represent only one trend in academic circles. The other, arbitrarily, let me tag with Haki R. Madhubuti, a Chicago writer of some note who influenced me early under the name Don L. Lee. As a young poet, before my own mature style had set, still very much in thrall to E.E. Cummings, I found in Don’t Cry, Scream by Don L. Lee liveliness of language to rival Cummings, and something of Cummings’ insouciance of attitude: “it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs.” (From the introduction to Cummings’ 1938 Collected Poems.)
At the time, liveliness of language meant more to me than what was signified; my experience did not extend much beyond the suburban library in which I found Lee’s book. The highly-charged racial subtext was beyond my comprehension; however today I find more of interest in Lee’s prose introduction than in the poems themselves. Lee sets forth a poetics which might very well be what Steele refers to euphemistically as “writ[ing] in a crazy fashion”. Typographical idiosyncrasies seem exactly of the order of those popularized by Cummings, and require no further comment:
Yet Steele and his clique represent only one trend in academic circles. The other, arbitrarily, let me tag with Haki R. Madhubuti, a Chicago writer of some note who influenced me early under the name Don L. Lee. As a young poet, before my own mature style had set, still very much in thrall to E.E. Cummings, I found in Don’t Cry, Scream by Don L. Lee liveliness of language to rival Cummings, and something of Cummings’ insouciance of attitude: “it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs.” (From the introduction to Cummings’ 1938 Collected Poems.)
At the time, liveliness of language meant more to me than what was signified; my experience did not extend much beyond the suburban library in which I found Lee’s book. The highly-charged racial subtext was beyond my comprehension; however today I find more of interest in Lee’s prose introduction than in the poems themselves. Lee sets forth a poetics which might very well be what Steele refers to euphemistically as “writ[ing] in a crazy fashion”. Typographical idiosyncrasies seem exactly of the order of those popularized by Cummings, and require no further comment:
What u will be reading is blackpoetry. Blackpoetry is written for/to/about & around the lives/spiritactions/humanism & total existence of blackpeople. Blackpoetry in form/sound/word usage/intonation/rhythm/repetition/direction/definition & beauty is opposed to that which is now (& yesterday) considered poetry, i.e., whi-te poetry. Blackpoetry in its purest form is diametrically opposed to whi-te poetry. Whereas, blackpoets deal in the concrete rather than the abstract (concrete: art for people’s sake; black language or Afro-american language in contrast to standard english, &c.). Blackpoetry moves to define & legitimize blackpeople’s reality (that which is real to us). Those in power (the unpeople) control and legitimize the negroes’ (therealpeople’s) reality out of that which they, the unpeople, consider real.
This is not entirely clear; though certainly a style of language is posited that is “in contrast to standard english”. “Blackpoetry in its purest form” then has no place for Claude McKay, although, in other respects, its aims seem congruent. Lee writes, “Blackpeople must move to where all confrontations with the unpeople are meaningful and constructive” which I take to be not far from McKay’s “The Negroes need salvation from within.” At any rate, it is clear that McKay’s adherence to “standard [E]nglish” excludes him from that segment of academia concerned with “[b]lackpoetry... written for/to/about & around the lives... of blackpeople” even as his subject matter excluded him from that segment which places a premium on “good grammar with meter...”.
“Blackpoetry” defines itself against “[t]hose in power (the unpeople)” without recognizing a huge gap filled with the powerless who yet adhere to “standard [E]nglish”, even as the “Neo Formulists” fail to recognize that there may be those who adhere to “good grammar” that yet do not toady to those in power. Either academic subset is incomplete—yet it helps me to understand what I considered the sub-grade scholarship supporting Claude McKay’s Complete Poems. The book—long overdue in 2008 when it was finally published—disappointed me almost as much as I had been eager for it. Not only were the additional poems it supplied (including the “Cycle Manuscript” about which I had heard so much) inferior, but the scholarly apparatus answered none of my questions: it had been edited under the auspices of “African American Literature” as opposed to just “English,” in which context (for example) questions about a new sonnet form would not arise. (As one who grew up on the Penguin English Poets series edited by Christopher Ricks perhaps my standards represent a bygone era.)
What may be perceived as a stridency that inheres in “If We Must Die” runs throughout Claude McKay’s poetry:
“Blackpoetry” defines itself against “[t]hose in power (the unpeople)” without recognizing a huge gap filled with the powerless who yet adhere to “standard [E]nglish”, even as the “Neo Formulists” fail to recognize that there may be those who adhere to “good grammar” that yet do not toady to those in power. Either academic subset is incomplete—yet it helps me to understand what I considered the sub-grade scholarship supporting Claude McKay’s Complete Poems. The book—long overdue in 2008 when it was finally published—disappointed me almost as much as I had been eager for it. Not only were the additional poems it supplied (including the “Cycle Manuscript” about which I had heard so much) inferior, but the scholarly apparatus answered none of my questions: it had been edited under the auspices of “African American Literature” as opposed to just “English,” in which context (for example) questions about a new sonnet form would not arise. (As one who grew up on the Penguin English Poets series edited by Christopher Ricks perhaps my standards represent a bygone era.)
What may be perceived as a stridency that inheres in “If We Must Die” runs throughout Claude McKay’s poetry:
Oh white man, you may suck up all my blood
And throw my carcass into potter’s field,
But never will I say with you that mud
Is bread for Negroes! Never will I yield.
Lines such as these (from his sonnet “Tiger”) go a long way toward explaining why the white establishment would not raise McKay, or why his earliest fame attached to poems of nostalgia for Jamaica. He preaches power, power that with a little imagination may be drawn upon by people of the gap: powerless that yet adhere to standard English. Even a poem like “Outcast” remains resonant beyond merely subjects born under the British colonial yoke in Jamaica. Though I have written two book-length poems in Spenser’s stanza, my Czech and Welsh ancestry find nevertheless that “[s]omething in me is lost, forever lost” as to English prosody’s “alien gods I bend my knee.” Today’s “great western world holds...in fee” any who hold a credit card, student loan, or even who face employment under the current system of taxation.
It is not far from McKay’s “Under the white man’s menace” to Richard Wright’s “huge, implacable elemental design” against which he felt “a longing to attack.” Its racial character is made explicit in McKay’s formulation, not rendered less universal: cruelty exists—both in the abstract and as witnessed in lads (“lynchers that were to be”) dancing “in fiendish glee.” Colonialism’s ubiquitous tentacles have begun to reach inwardly; or rather, national identity provides no failsafe protection. Rather one’s placement within the corporate structure—privately-owned corporations seen as controlling the military-industrial-congressional complex, not governments—guarantees “freedom”. Policemen are seen as flunkies to the corporate powers. The names and faces change (if not the general hue), but power dynamics today are not so different from in McKay’s time. (McKay disparaged Wright that “he knew from which side his bread was buttered”: an individual’s stance in relation to those powers might run the gambit—McKay’s remained staunchly inflexible.)
Wayne Cooper’s biography begins with mention of an article McKay wrote in 1921 about the Irish revolution, in which he asserted that experience gave him clearer insight than either the British government or the British Left: “My belonging to a subject race entitles me to some understanding of them”. We tend to think of the appropriation of material resources; yet post-colonial studies have broadened the perspective. When I first read McKay—“If We Must Die”—and for a while thereafter, I had no sense of his racial character; then later, I felt confused at how a black man could have an Irish surname. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, in his book Something Torn and New, studies Edmund Spenser, the poet: “Most important and formative in his poetry and politics was the fact that he was an English settler in Ireland, in close touch with a culture he loathed and envied, as is made clear in his important prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland.” The work was prescriptive: a “systematic erasure of the Irish memory” and “abrogation of the Irish naming system” were called for.
Ngugi brings his argument to America:
It is not far from McKay’s “Under the white man’s menace” to Richard Wright’s “huge, implacable elemental design” against which he felt “a longing to attack.” Its racial character is made explicit in McKay’s formulation, not rendered less universal: cruelty exists—both in the abstract and as witnessed in lads (“lynchers that were to be”) dancing “in fiendish glee.” Colonialism’s ubiquitous tentacles have begun to reach inwardly; or rather, national identity provides no failsafe protection. Rather one’s placement within the corporate structure—privately-owned corporations seen as controlling the military-industrial-congressional complex, not governments—guarantees “freedom”. Policemen are seen as flunkies to the corporate powers. The names and faces change (if not the general hue), but power dynamics today are not so different from in McKay’s time. (McKay disparaged Wright that “he knew from which side his bread was buttered”: an individual’s stance in relation to those powers might run the gambit—McKay’s remained staunchly inflexible.)
Wayne Cooper’s biography begins with mention of an article McKay wrote in 1921 about the Irish revolution, in which he asserted that experience gave him clearer insight than either the British government or the British Left: “My belonging to a subject race entitles me to some understanding of them”. We tend to think of the appropriation of material resources; yet post-colonial studies have broadened the perspective. When I first read McKay—“If We Must Die”—and for a while thereafter, I had no sense of his racial character; then later, I felt confused at how a black man could have an Irish surname. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, in his book Something Torn and New, studies Edmund Spenser, the poet: “Most important and formative in his poetry and politics was the fact that he was an English settler in Ireland, in close touch with a culture he loathed and envied, as is made clear in his important prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland.” The work was prescriptive: a “systematic erasure of the Irish memory” and “abrogation of the Irish naming system” were called for.
Ngugi brings his argument to America:
Spenser’s View was published in 1586, and no doubt much of it would have been read by those who were devising schemes for the settler colonies in the “new” world. Ireland was the first English colony. Spenser and Sir Walter Raleigh—writer, explorer, spy, colonizer—were of the same circle, both landowners in the Irish province of Munster. The ideas in the View were carried by Raleigh and company to America, the settler plantation having become the prototype of the English settler plantation in America and the Caribbean. The attitude toward Native Americans was the same as that articulated in the View vis-a-vis the Irish.
The experience of the millions of Africans brought in slave ships to America best illustrates Spenser’s strategy. A systematic program eliminated their memory of Africa. Their own names and naming systems once again were seen as a barrier to the intended amnesia. So, break up their names. Give them the names of the owners of the plantations to signify their being the property of Brown or Smith or Williams.
Ngugi’s interests lie in a different direction than mine: nonetheless, his thesis, which I will simplify and somewhat distort in my paraphrase, is germane. In his view, English holds something of the same position in the world that Latin once held in Europe. He raises the prospect of English dying, as various African tongues free themselves from its hegemony, even as, during the European movement toward Renaissance, writers of genius—Dante, then Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes—effected the same, conferring legitimacy upon their respective national tongues. As I say, something of a distortion, but a useful corrective to the view we are commonly taught: that our English represents the be-all and end-all of linguistic evolution.
Ngugi’s concern lies with the question, regarding literary endeavor, Who profiteth? In Africa, with scads of writers publishing in the language of the colonizer (whichever it may be), to the neglect of native tongue, and cannibalizing indigenous tradition for material, is it not enforcing colonialism’s “ambitious... scheme of reconstructing an African whose historical, physical, and metaphysical geography begins with European memory” and thereby performing “a double cultural decapitation”? “Dismembered from the land, from labor, from power, and from memory, the result is destruction of the base from which people launch themselves into the world.”
Ngugi retains his African tongue; and so has made the political choice of writing his novels in Gikuyu—such an option is not available to an African of the diaspora who has lost his native tongue, much less an isolated individual and outcast without recourse to something like Yeats’ ambition “to plunge into the Irish heritage to create from it an Anglophone-Irish literature that had an Irish character”. Ngugi cites Yeats:
Ngugi’s concern lies with the question, regarding literary endeavor, Who profiteth? In Africa, with scads of writers publishing in the language of the colonizer (whichever it may be), to the neglect of native tongue, and cannibalizing indigenous tradition for material, is it not enforcing colonialism’s “ambitious... scheme of reconstructing an African whose historical, physical, and metaphysical geography begins with European memory” and thereby performing “a double cultural decapitation”? “Dismembered from the land, from labor, from power, and from memory, the result is destruction of the base from which people launch themselves into the world.”
Ngugi retains his African tongue; and so has made the political choice of writing his novels in Gikuyu—such an option is not available to an African of the diaspora who has lost his native tongue, much less an isolated individual and outcast without recourse to something like Yeats’ ambition “to plunge into the Irish heritage to create from it an Anglophone-Irish literature that had an Irish character”. Ngugi cites Yeats:
Is there then no hope for the de-Anglicisation of our people? Can we not build a national tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish in spirit from being English in language? Can we not keep the continuity of the nation’s life... by translating or retelling in English, which shall have an indefinable Irish quality of rhythm and style, all that is best of ancient literature?
The enrichment of English by Irish writers—indeed by Welsh, Scottish, among others—has been unquantifiable, not to mention (as Ngugi points out) the pervasiveness of African-American intonations and constructions:
Cut off from continuous contact with Africa, and yet thrust into the center of modern capitalist production... [American slaves] had to innovate or perish. Even the corpse into which their languages had been turned metamorphosed into a spirit haunting European languages, English mostly. That is why Zora Neal Hurston could rightfully assert in “Characteristics of Negro Expression” that “the American Negro has done wonders to the English language.... [H]e had made over a great part of the tongue to his liking and has [had] his revision accepted by the ruling class.”
For all that, and despite his protestations to the contrary, the poetry of Haki R. Madhubuti remains remarkably “standard” in its English. The prose I have quoted—regardless its typographical idiosyncrasies—also retains an English core, however embellished by political agenda.
What separates Don L. Lee from Claude McKay is perhaps best explained in the words of introduction Gwendolyn Brooks wrote for Don’t Cry, Scream.
What separates Don L. Lee from Claude McKay is perhaps best explained in the words of introduction Gwendolyn Brooks wrote for Don’t Cry, Scream.
Don Lee knows that nothing human is elegant. He is not interested in modes of writing that aspire to elegance. He is well-acquainted with “elegant” literature (what hasn’t he read?) but, while certainly respecting the advantages and influence of good workmanship, he is not interested in supplying the needs of the English Departments at Harvard and Oxford nor the editors of Partisan Review, although he could mightily serve as fact factory for these. He speaks to blacks hungry for what they themselves refer to as “real poetry.” These blacks find themselves and the stuff of their existence in his healthy, lithe, lusty reaches of free verse. The last thing these people crave is elegance. It is very hard to enchant, with elegant song, the ears of a fellow whose stomach is growling. He can’t hear you. The more interesting noise is too loud.
McKay’s life certainly lacked the creature comforts of Professor Madhubuti’s, yet when he portrayed it in verse, his insight lent itself to something almost as impossible as elegance—a sympathy perhaps, or an introspection.
The Castaways
The vivid grass with visible delight
Springing triumphant from the pregnant earth,
The butterflies, and sparrows in brief flight
Chirping and dancing for the season's birth,
The dandelions and rare daffodils
That touch the deep-stirred heart with hands of gold,
The thrushes sending forth their joyous trills,--
Not these, not these did I at first behold!
But seated on the benches daubed with green,
The castaways of life, a few asleep,
Some withered women desolate and mean,
And over all, life’s shadows dark and deep.
Moaning I turned away, for misery
I have the strength to bear but not to see.
His was the ability—which his poems teach—to stand elegant in face of “implacable, elemental design.” It is what keeps McKay relevant in Ferguson.
Gwendolyn Brooks—like J.V. Cunningham—presents an odd case. Like his, her reputation has been profoundly exaggerated based upon the profusions of a limited academic circle. Her genuine talent, to be sure, was not negligible; she took the courageous choice of a hard turn away from mainstream literary relevancy in furtherance of political beliefs, even as Cunningham, with no less of a talent, refused in his poetry to be cowed from arcane brevity or what Steele refers to as “low naughtiness.” Yet, as poet laureate of Illinois from 1968 until her death in 2000 (only the third after Howard Austin and Carl Sandburg to hold that honorary position), her entire career was marked with the imprimatur of respectability no less imposing than Cunningham’s. I suggest no direct correlation; but as such artificially inflated reputations wane, McKay’s will hold secure or rise (even in academic circles), pardoned by “Time that.../ Worships language and forgives/ Everyone by whom it lives.”
“Forgives” may be entirely too appropriate. McKay’s cantankerous personality did not smooth the way for him. Cooper writes, “Despite his love for its folk culture, McKay never really learned to function in black American society.” When he protested it was “simply because I have no close academic associates...” that he failed to gain employment suitable to his “intellectual attainments”, he was blind to the part he himself played in hampering those relationships that would have helped him. His biographies are replete with instances of him burning bridges before he came to them; furthermore he did not help his literary career by being absent from the American scene for most of two decades after the Red Summer. (He left for England in fall of 1919: the high racial pitch got too hot for him, some of his peers suggested.)
Then, as today, money did not come from writing poetry; McKay took up journalism, and also wrote a succession of novels. He also had patrons, of whom he was unabashedly contemptuous. Needless to say, friends tended to drift away from him; the loyalty of Max Eastman was a rarity, yet even there, signs of distance grew apparent.
McKay had—as Eastman and others knew—a natural born lyric genius; unfortunately, his talents did not translate so well to novels. He never could come up with an acceptable plot, and furthermore insisted on portrayals of American blacks that were far from complimentary. “A part of him always remained the outside observer and critic”, writes Cooper. His Selected Poems are well chosen: even in verse the quality of his writing fluctuated.
As an editor of Max Eastman’s Liberator, McKay reached the professional apex of his career. Tyrone Tillery, in his biography Claude McKay, describes an incident that would alter McKay’s relation to Eastman and the rest of the white staff:
Gwendolyn Brooks—like J.V. Cunningham—presents an odd case. Like his, her reputation has been profoundly exaggerated based upon the profusions of a limited academic circle. Her genuine talent, to be sure, was not negligible; she took the courageous choice of a hard turn away from mainstream literary relevancy in furtherance of political beliefs, even as Cunningham, with no less of a talent, refused in his poetry to be cowed from arcane brevity or what Steele refers to as “low naughtiness.” Yet, as poet laureate of Illinois from 1968 until her death in 2000 (only the third after Howard Austin and Carl Sandburg to hold that honorary position), her entire career was marked with the imprimatur of respectability no less imposing than Cunningham’s. I suggest no direct correlation; but as such artificially inflated reputations wane, McKay’s will hold secure or rise (even in academic circles), pardoned by “Time that.../ Worships language and forgives/ Everyone by whom it lives.”
“Forgives” may be entirely too appropriate. McKay’s cantankerous personality did not smooth the way for him. Cooper writes, “Despite his love for its folk culture, McKay never really learned to function in black American society.” When he protested it was “simply because I have no close academic associates...” that he failed to gain employment suitable to his “intellectual attainments”, he was blind to the part he himself played in hampering those relationships that would have helped him. His biographies are replete with instances of him burning bridges before he came to them; furthermore he did not help his literary career by being absent from the American scene for most of two decades after the Red Summer. (He left for England in fall of 1919: the high racial pitch got too hot for him, some of his peers suggested.)
Then, as today, money did not come from writing poetry; McKay took up journalism, and also wrote a succession of novels. He also had patrons, of whom he was unabashedly contemptuous. Needless to say, friends tended to drift away from him; the loyalty of Max Eastman was a rarity, yet even there, signs of distance grew apparent.
McKay had—as Eastman and others knew—a natural born lyric genius; unfortunately, his talents did not translate so well to novels. He never could come up with an acceptable plot, and furthermore insisted on portrayals of American blacks that were far from complimentary. “A part of him always remained the outside observer and critic”, writes Cooper. His Selected Poems are well chosen: even in verse the quality of his writing fluctuated.
As an editor of Max Eastman’s Liberator, McKay reached the professional apex of his career. Tyrone Tillery, in his biography Claude McKay, describes an incident that would alter McKay’s relation to Eastman and the rest of the white staff:
The Liberator received an invitation extended by the Theatre Guild’s publicity agent to send its drama critic to review Leonid Andreyev’s play He Who Gets Slapped. Since the regular drama critic was away, McKay as coeditor decided to assume the role of theatre critic. In the company of William Gropper, the Liberator’s artist, McKay went to the theater, where he discovered that the management had intended the “first row” tickets to be used only by whites.While the white Gropper was offered a seat near the stage, McKay, who was functioning as the official drama critic, was shunted upstairs to the balcony. Gropper declined to sit alone and accompanied the outraged and terribly hurt McKay to the balcony. “Suddenly,” McKay recalled, “the realization came to me, I had come here as a dramatic critic, a lover of the theater, and a free soul. But—I was abruptly reminded—those things did not matter. The important fact, with which I was suddenly slapped in the face, was my color. I am a Negro.
“I had come to see a tragic farce—and I found myself unwittingly the hero of one”, McKay wrote, according to Cooper reaching “polemical heights that he never again equaled in his prose”:
Poor painful blackface, intruding into the holy place of the whites. How like a spectre you haunt the pale devils! Always at their elbows, always darkly peering through the window, giving them no rest, no peace. How they burn up their energies trying to keep you out! How apologetic and uneasy they are, yes, even the best of them, poor devils, when you force an entrance, blackface, facetiously, incorrigibly smiling or disturbingly composed. Shock them out of their complacency, blackface, make them uncomfortable, make them unhappy! Give them no peace, no rest. How can they bear your presence, blackface, great unspeakable ghost of Western civilization.
Possibly McKay’s life—his status as an outsider—had kept him from feeling the full brunt of what black American society had been coping with all along; needless to say the incident shook him profoundly. He resigned his editorship; his last Liberator article, published in August 1922, warned, “This racial question may be eventually the monkey wrench thrown into the machinery of the American revolutionary struggle. The Negro radical wants more than anything else to find in the working class movement a revolutionary attitude toward the Negroes different from the sympathetic interest of bourgeois philanthropists and capitalist politicians.” In London, he had worked with Sylvia Pankhurst’s Worker’s Dreadnought, a radical newspaper of the working-class movement. Now he would go to Russia; and not return to Harlem until 1934.
Like many who sided with the worker, McKay initially had high hopes for the Russian experiment; he was impressed by Lenin, and Trotsky was responsive when McKay informed him his assessment that “the greatest difficulty that the Communists of America have to overcome” was “the fact... that they first have to emancipate themselves before they can be able to reach the Negroes with any kind of propaganda.” Yet, while he enjoyed being feted, and treated importantly, he grew skeptical of Communism. Later he would say, “I went into Russia as a writer and a free spirit and left the same, because I was convinced that however far I was advanced in social ideas, if I could do something significantly creative as a Negro it would mean more to my group and the world than being merely a social agitator.” In this I believe him correct—though the proof has been a long time in coming. If a “word on the communist side” would have raised him from poverty, as Eastman suggested, he not only refused to speak it: he grew virulently anti-communist, going on the attack even when there was no personal benefit in doing so.
Back in America in 1934, after living in France and Morocco, McKay found that the Harlem literary movement had substantially passed him by, into the hands of a younger generation; he felt he did not fit in with the “niggerati” (as he claimed the black intelligentsia called itself). During his expatriate years, when he might have shepherded his literary career forward, he was otherwise occupied with projects that never seemed to come to fruition. In 1940 he became a naturalized US citizen; eventually he moved to Chicago, where the Catholic church welcomed and supported him, until his death in 1948. He himself acknowledged, had he stayed in Morocco, perhaps his conversion might have gone another way; but he felt the Catholic church was the only organization capable of withstanding communism.
Somewhere along the way, as it happened, he attended the release party for Gwendolyn Brooks’ first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). In her early poetry she displayed a fondness for the sonnet form as well—not necessarily due to his influence or his influence alone: the form was heavily promoted among early poets of the Harlem Renaissance, though some, like Langston Hughes, cleaved to free verse (or vers libre), even as Brooks would herself later lurch in that direction.
The form itself—even as Latin was withdrawing from its hegemonic paramountcy in Europe—infiltrated all the languages of Europe during the Renaissance. It started in Sicily, moved to Italy, with local variations. In his essay “The Renaissance in England” J.V. Cunningham gives a good account of the courtly origins of Astrophil and Stella by Philip Sidney, “the earliest sonnet sequence in English”. A poem “is a system of propositions”, he writes; those of a sonnet a peculiar sort. Edmund Spenser invented a unique variety (dependent on interlocking quatrains); but sonnets in English have tended to be either the Shakespearean (or “Elizabethan”) or the Petrarchan (or “Italian”). Brooks’ own widely-anthologized sonnet “The Sonnet Ballad” is a hybrid type that I have come to refer to as the “half-Spenserian, with the octet following Spenser’s model while the sestet reverts to common Elizabethan. Except for McKay’s (and my several imitations) I’ve seen no other sonnets that utilize his format with its ingenious rhyme scheme: something I attribute to the obscurity of his work among the “Neo Formulist” movement.
Cunningham, in “The Ancient Quarrel Between History and Poetry,” asserts:
Like many who sided with the worker, McKay initially had high hopes for the Russian experiment; he was impressed by Lenin, and Trotsky was responsive when McKay informed him his assessment that “the greatest difficulty that the Communists of America have to overcome” was “the fact... that they first have to emancipate themselves before they can be able to reach the Negroes with any kind of propaganda.” Yet, while he enjoyed being feted, and treated importantly, he grew skeptical of Communism. Later he would say, “I went into Russia as a writer and a free spirit and left the same, because I was convinced that however far I was advanced in social ideas, if I could do something significantly creative as a Negro it would mean more to my group and the world than being merely a social agitator.” In this I believe him correct—though the proof has been a long time in coming. If a “word on the communist side” would have raised him from poverty, as Eastman suggested, he not only refused to speak it: he grew virulently anti-communist, going on the attack even when there was no personal benefit in doing so.
Back in America in 1934, after living in France and Morocco, McKay found that the Harlem literary movement had substantially passed him by, into the hands of a younger generation; he felt he did not fit in with the “niggerati” (as he claimed the black intelligentsia called itself). During his expatriate years, when he might have shepherded his literary career forward, he was otherwise occupied with projects that never seemed to come to fruition. In 1940 he became a naturalized US citizen; eventually he moved to Chicago, where the Catholic church welcomed and supported him, until his death in 1948. He himself acknowledged, had he stayed in Morocco, perhaps his conversion might have gone another way; but he felt the Catholic church was the only organization capable of withstanding communism.
Somewhere along the way, as it happened, he attended the release party for Gwendolyn Brooks’ first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). In her early poetry she displayed a fondness for the sonnet form as well—not necessarily due to his influence or his influence alone: the form was heavily promoted among early poets of the Harlem Renaissance, though some, like Langston Hughes, cleaved to free verse (or vers libre), even as Brooks would herself later lurch in that direction.
The form itself—even as Latin was withdrawing from its hegemonic paramountcy in Europe—infiltrated all the languages of Europe during the Renaissance. It started in Sicily, moved to Italy, with local variations. In his essay “The Renaissance in England” J.V. Cunningham gives a good account of the courtly origins of Astrophil and Stella by Philip Sidney, “the earliest sonnet sequence in English”. A poem “is a system of propositions”, he writes; those of a sonnet a peculiar sort. Edmund Spenser invented a unique variety (dependent on interlocking quatrains); but sonnets in English have tended to be either the Shakespearean (or “Elizabethan”) or the Petrarchan (or “Italian”). Brooks’ own widely-anthologized sonnet “The Sonnet Ballad” is a hybrid type that I have come to refer to as the “half-Spenserian, with the octet following Spenser’s model while the sestet reverts to common Elizabethan. Except for McKay’s (and my several imitations) I’ve seen no other sonnets that utilize his format with its ingenious rhyme scheme: something I attribute to the obscurity of his work among the “Neo Formulist” movement.
Cunningham, in “The Ancient Quarrel Between History and Poetry,” asserts:
[T]here is a body of knowledge associated with literature that is in itself worth knowing: not only literary history proper, but also history in the ordinary sense of the term, and indeed many other fields of learning. What is more, all these are useful; in fact, it is doubtful if there by any kind of knowledge that will not at some point or other prove useful in the study of literature. Furthermore, the ways of understanding and habits of attention which are developed by some of these disciplines are of the greatest value, both in themselves and for the study of literature.
While this is true, it is easy to understand the aversion to imported forms among subject populations. Possibly had McKay lived longer, he would have turned against the sonnet form with revulsion—the movement I have chosen to epitomize by Haki R. Madhubuti seems to advocate as much—but given his mastery of the form, as a fellow English speaker I’m gratified that he did not. The expressive possibilities of his unique development remain untapped.
If the enforcement mechanisms of colonialism function most smoothly when they are hidden, they became increasingly obvious with the end of World War II. In the 1960s, writers like Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) reclaimed African names in a show of powerful symbolic solidarity with their ethnic heritage. Matters may be obfuscated via linguistic trickery; yet people know when their land or their autonomy has been taken from them. As Ngugi writes:
If the enforcement mechanisms of colonialism function most smoothly when they are hidden, they became increasingly obvious with the end of World War II. In the 1960s, writers like Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) reclaimed African names in a show of powerful symbolic solidarity with their ethnic heritage. Matters may be obfuscated via linguistic trickery; yet people know when their land or their autonomy has been taken from them. As Ngugi writes:
It is interesting that Spenser, in his manual for colonizing the Irish, also recommends a scorched-earth policy to induce famine. He had seen such a policy break resistance in Munster (as noted, both Spenser and Raleigh had plantations there) where despite previously being endowed with plenty of cattle and corn: “[Y]et ere one year and a half they were brought up to such wretchedness, as that any stony heart would have rued the same. Out of the very corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them. They looked anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves.” Two and a half centuries later, following the English-induced potato famine of 1846-1860, during which Irish people died in large numbers and many survivors were forced to emigrate to America, the weakened community that remained was unable to resist linguistic Anglicization through new education policies that imposed English on the Irish.
—the right of the conqueror, as Ngugi elsewhere notes (citing Japanese practice in Korea). One immediately thinks of M.I. Finley’s oft-repeated interjection from a very different context within the realm of ancient history: “The world will have to be changed, not the past.”
Many of those Irish that moved to America, found themselves later threatened by the black migration northward which occurred after the freeing of slaves in the American Civil War. In Chicago, social and athletic clubs fostered cohesion among the Irish (as among other communities), and were often affiliated with politics. One, the Hamburg Athletic Club of Bridgeport, was involved in the Red Summer riots of 1919. Future Mayor Richard J. Daley, at 17, was a member: he would later become the organization’s president—for the rest of his life he refused to confirm or deny involvement or having instigated attacks against blacks. (Presumably he would laugh it off.) His son, also a future mayor, Richard M. Daley, as State’s Attorney, is said to have cast a blind eye on routine torture of black detainees by Chicago police officials: he overlooked if he did not oversee.
“One of the strangest things in the process of getting an education is the discovery of what people haven’t told you about,” wrote Elizabeth Sewell: this holds true in all walks of life, and certainly in the academia. The poetry of McKay has not fared well in academia, but probably without any overt propaganda campaign against him. At his time—as Rita Dove notes in The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry—there were many other fish in the pond: “Four men emerged as early monoliths: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound”, “soon joined by T.S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings”.
Wallace Stevens, quoted by Cunningham, found reputation to be not wholly a positive: “I don’t know what there is any longer to say about Eliot. His prodigious reputation is a great difficulty.” Under such conditions, Cunningham writes, the function of criticism “becomes one of subtraction and recovery” because “a classic in time becomes a palimpsest, where interpretation blots the text, both in the local context and in the large.” Also, “A work of art is the embodiment of an intention. To realize an intention in language is the function of the writer. To realize from language the intention of the author is the function of the reader or critic, and his method is historical or philological interpretation.” McKay’s poetry—at least the best of it which is included in his Selected Poems—retains immediacy, in part because neglect has kept his work relatively free from interpretive overlay.
McKay, if he is studied, is studied today within the historical sweep of “black studies” or cultural history—not as literature. My themes in this essay have skirted issues of racial politics and academic reputation: but much of McKay’s poetry was responding to situation, performing one of the basic functions of poetry, commemoration, of love or the dead, or even, as in this poem, both together:
Many of those Irish that moved to America, found themselves later threatened by the black migration northward which occurred after the freeing of slaves in the American Civil War. In Chicago, social and athletic clubs fostered cohesion among the Irish (as among other communities), and were often affiliated with politics. One, the Hamburg Athletic Club of Bridgeport, was involved in the Red Summer riots of 1919. Future Mayor Richard J. Daley, at 17, was a member: he would later become the organization’s president—for the rest of his life he refused to confirm or deny involvement or having instigated attacks against blacks. (Presumably he would laugh it off.) His son, also a future mayor, Richard M. Daley, as State’s Attorney, is said to have cast a blind eye on routine torture of black detainees by Chicago police officials: he overlooked if he did not oversee.
“One of the strangest things in the process of getting an education is the discovery of what people haven’t told you about,” wrote Elizabeth Sewell: this holds true in all walks of life, and certainly in the academia. The poetry of McKay has not fared well in academia, but probably without any overt propaganda campaign against him. At his time—as Rita Dove notes in The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry—there were many other fish in the pond: “Four men emerged as early monoliths: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound”, “soon joined by T.S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings”.
Wallace Stevens, quoted by Cunningham, found reputation to be not wholly a positive: “I don’t know what there is any longer to say about Eliot. His prodigious reputation is a great difficulty.” Under such conditions, Cunningham writes, the function of criticism “becomes one of subtraction and recovery” because “a classic in time becomes a palimpsest, where interpretation blots the text, both in the local context and in the large.” Also, “A work of art is the embodiment of an intention. To realize an intention in language is the function of the writer. To realize from language the intention of the author is the function of the reader or critic, and his method is historical or philological interpretation.” McKay’s poetry—at least the best of it which is included in his Selected Poems—retains immediacy, in part because neglect has kept his work relatively free from interpretive overlay.
McKay, if he is studied, is studied today within the historical sweep of “black studies” or cultural history—not as literature. My themes in this essay have skirted issues of racial politics and academic reputation: but much of McKay’s poetry was responding to situation, performing one of the basic functions of poetry, commemoration, of love or the dead, or even, as in this poem, both together:
Rest in Peace
No more for you the city’s thorny ways,
The ugly corners of the Negro belt;
The miseries and pains of these harsh days
By you will never, never again be felt.
No more, if still you wander, will you meet
With nights of unabating bitterness;
They cannot reach you in your safe retreat,
The city’s hate, the city’s prejudice!
’Twas sudden--but your menial task is done,
The dawn now breaks on you, the dark is over,
The sea is crossed, the longed-for port is won;
Farewell, oh, fare you well! my friend and lover.
His poems from the summer of 1919 were written with the people in mind who were impacted by those events. The sonnet was not so much a feather in one’s cap as a vehicle for saying something. A simple eulogy as the preceding cannot be belabored with interpretation, except insofar as it serves to reinforce the historical—a history no one in (white) academia much wants to examine, even in spite of the author’s “key technical facility for writing traditional verse.”
McKay’s intended reader is the same that Millay conjures in her adjuration “To Those Without Pity”:
McKay’s intended reader is the same that Millay conjures in her adjuration “To Those Without Pity”:
Cruel of heart, lay down my song,
Your reading eyes have done me wrong,
Not for you was the pen bitten,
And the mind wrung, and the song written.
The neglect of either’s poetry in academia has not harmed Millay nor McKay in the long run. As evidenced in her sonnets for Sacco and Vanzetti, social concerns remained a prime motivator of her poetry—perhaps a little too much so, she came to regret. One does not need to be black to squander away talent in dissolution. In both cases we are lucky to be the beneficiaries of the “something to perfection brought” by their respective pens, through lives of dedication and turmoil.
It remains to be seen whether great poetry will arise from recent scenes of social unrest: “We are being suffocated by a system of Jim Crow justice,” is said in allusion to the suffocation death of Eric Garner; protesters have borne signs and worn shirts with the slogans “I can’t breathe” (Garner’s last words repeated multitudinous times before his death) and “Hands up, don’t shoot” (in reference to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson). In both cases (and something of a historical anomaly) the investigating Grand Juries declined to pass down indictments against the alleged murderers, both policemen. But of course, the production of great poetry, and even great literary reputations, is really beside the point. The one hundredth anniversary of Red Summer 1919 is fast approaching and it seems little progress has been made.
I mentioned that my book, Embodiment & Release began and ended with three quotes. In retrospect, I look at the three figures and find more meaning therein than I originally intended. Orozco, the Mexican, visited the United States, and then returned home; McKay, once communist-leaning and then avowed anti-communist, became a naturalized citizen. And Finley, who was born in the United States, was driven from from the country because somebody thought he may have once been a communist—he was one of the few academics persecuted during the McCarthy era able to salvage a career by finding a job abroad, in Britain, where he took citizenship and accepted a knighthood.
A poem I would later write proposed for McKay the designation “Father of our Country.” In a political sense, this is absurd, and it embarrasses me to this day that I proposed such in print; yet, from an emotional standpoint, the idea still holds. Demographics have changed in this country. So much about Claude McKay—his fierce independence, and his thirst for justice—are characteristics I should hope to see widespread in the America of the future. “I will not toy with it nor bend an inch” he wrote in his sonnet “The White City” about his “life-long hate,” intending to “bear it nobly as I live my part.” Other lines which impressed me greatly, from the sonnet titled “I Know My Soul,” have found recurrent echo in my own work: “Contemplating the strange, I’m comforted/ By this narcotic thought: I know my soul.”
McKay did not flinch from self-knowledge; while we are busy being “Distracted from distraction by distraction” to use Eliot’s phrase from “Burnt Norton”. His ghost may not walk the halls of academia (much), but you know it walks in Ferguson, or on the Washington mall when there is a protest. His poetry is not the sort that lauds victimhood, but maintains dignity, even as—confronted with the worst forms of intolerance and abuse imaginable in civilized society—it evinces something like the stoicism that the emperor Marcus Aurelius proposed: “The best revenge is not to be like your enemies.”
McKay was very proud of his peasant roots; and yet it was in the industrialized modern city that he came into his own. His love poems seem to pertain more to “one night stands” than any kind of courtly ideal; and yet he was able to take that preeminently courtly form of the sonnet and wring something completely different out of it than plaintive Elizabethan romantic longings:
It remains to be seen whether great poetry will arise from recent scenes of social unrest: “We are being suffocated by a system of Jim Crow justice,” is said in allusion to the suffocation death of Eric Garner; protesters have borne signs and worn shirts with the slogans “I can’t breathe” (Garner’s last words repeated multitudinous times before his death) and “Hands up, don’t shoot” (in reference to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson). In both cases (and something of a historical anomaly) the investigating Grand Juries declined to pass down indictments against the alleged murderers, both policemen. But of course, the production of great poetry, and even great literary reputations, is really beside the point. The one hundredth anniversary of Red Summer 1919 is fast approaching and it seems little progress has been made.
I mentioned that my book, Embodiment & Release began and ended with three quotes. In retrospect, I look at the three figures and find more meaning therein than I originally intended. Orozco, the Mexican, visited the United States, and then returned home; McKay, once communist-leaning and then avowed anti-communist, became a naturalized citizen. And Finley, who was born in the United States, was driven from from the country because somebody thought he may have once been a communist—he was one of the few academics persecuted during the McCarthy era able to salvage a career by finding a job abroad, in Britain, where he took citizenship and accepted a knighthood.
A poem I would later write proposed for McKay the designation “Father of our Country.” In a political sense, this is absurd, and it embarrasses me to this day that I proposed such in print; yet, from an emotional standpoint, the idea still holds. Demographics have changed in this country. So much about Claude McKay—his fierce independence, and his thirst for justice—are characteristics I should hope to see widespread in the America of the future. “I will not toy with it nor bend an inch” he wrote in his sonnet “The White City” about his “life-long hate,” intending to “bear it nobly as I live my part.” Other lines which impressed me greatly, from the sonnet titled “I Know My Soul,” have found recurrent echo in my own work: “Contemplating the strange, I’m comforted/ By this narcotic thought: I know my soul.”
McKay did not flinch from self-knowledge; while we are busy being “Distracted from distraction by distraction” to use Eliot’s phrase from “Burnt Norton”. His ghost may not walk the halls of academia (much), but you know it walks in Ferguson, or on the Washington mall when there is a protest. His poetry is not the sort that lauds victimhood, but maintains dignity, even as—confronted with the worst forms of intolerance and abuse imaginable in civilized society—it evinces something like the stoicism that the emperor Marcus Aurelius proposed: “The best revenge is not to be like your enemies.”
McKay was very proud of his peasant roots; and yet it was in the industrialized modern city that he came into his own. His love poems seem to pertain more to “one night stands” than any kind of courtly ideal; and yet he was able to take that preeminently courtly form of the sonnet and wring something completely different out of it than plaintive Elizabethan romantic longings:
To the White Fiends
Think you I am not fiend and savage too?
Think you I could not arm me with a gun
And shoot down ten of you for every one
Of my black brothers murdered, burnt by you?
Be not deceived, for every deed you do
I could match—out-match: am I not Afric’s son,
Black of that black land where black deeds are done?
But the Almighty from the darkness drew
My soul and said: Even thou shalt be a light
Awhile to burn on the benighted earth,
Thy dusky face I set among the white
For thee to prove thyself of highest worth;
Before the world is swallowed up in night,
To show thy little lamp: go forth, go forth!