Complete Poems (American Poetry Recovery Series) [Hardcover]

Claude McKay (Author), William Maxwell (Author)

Book Description

Series: American Poetry Recovery Series | Publication Date: January 29, 2004

Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred published here for the first time, this collection showcases the range and dynamism of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet whose life and poetry were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest. His first poems were composed in rural Jamaican dialect and launched his lifelong commitment to representing everyday black culture from the bottom up. McKay migrated to New York, reinvigorating the standard English sonnet and helping to spark the Harlem Renaissance with poems such as "If We Must Die."Coming under scrutiny for his Bolshevist views, McKay left America in 1922 and spent twelve years traveling the world. When he returned to Harlem in 1934, having denounced Stalin's Soviet Union, his pristine "Violent Sonnets" gave way to confessional lyrics strongly informed by his newfound Catholicism. McKay eludes easy definition, which is why this complete anthology, vividly introduced and carefully annotated by William Maxwell, is at once necessary and rewarding. Here the reader can trace the complex, transnational evolution of a major voice in twentieth-century poetry.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Claude McKay's Complete Poems comes as an invaluable gift to all lovers of McKay, African-American literature, and literature in general. McKay's eminence among poets of the Harlem Renaissance is richly documented in this scrupulous collection. With a lively, always perceptive introduction and meticulous notes, the Complete Poems stands as the definitive gathering of the verse of a writer who saw early the beauty and humanity of the black world at home and abroad." --Arnold Rampersad, author of The Life of Langston Hughes and the Sara Hart Kimball Professor of the Humanities, Stanford University. "This is a wonderful book. McKay is a hugely important figure in the development of Caribbean and African American poetry, and bringing his poems together in one place does an invaluable service to readers of all backgrounds. Maxwell's outstanding introduction is the most insightful and cogent critical assessment of McKay's poetry to date." --James Smethurst, author of The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946

Book Description

Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred previously unpublished works, this unique collection showcases the intellectual range of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose life and work were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest. McKay's first poems were composed in rural Jamaican creole and launched his lifelong commitment to representing everyday black culture from the bottom up. Migrating to New York, he reinvigorated the English sonnet and helped spark the Harlem Renaissance with poems such as "If We Must Die." After coming under scrutiny for his communism, he traveled throughout Europe and North Africa for twelve years and returned to Harlem in 1934, having denounced Stalin's Soviet Union. By then, McKay's pristine "violent sonnets" were giving way to confessional lyrics informed by his newfound Catholicism.

McKay's verse eludes easy definition, yet this complete anthology, vividly introduced and carefully annotated by William J. Maxwell, acquaints readers with the full transnational evolution of a major voice in twentieth-century poetry.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 456 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press; annotated edition edition (January 29, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252028821
• ISBN-13: 978-0252028823
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,402,951 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars McKay's Complete Poems: A Historic Event, March 27, 2004

By 

Gary Holcomb (Emporia, KS USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Complete Poems (American Poetry Recovery Series) (Hardcover)

Most readers will probably be aware of McKay's 1919 poem "If We Must Die," accurately recognized in anthologies of African American literature as the first openly defiant black insurgent lyric during the racial violence of the post-Great War period. Edited and introduced by William Maxwell, author of New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars (1999), this new collection of more than three hundred of McKay's poems-including nearly a hundred published for the first time-provides an entirely new understanding of the diaspora-trotting author's verse, from his "dialect" poetry published in Jamaica during the early teens to McKay's somewhat misleadingly titled "Right Turn To Catholicism" writings during the mid-forties.

Most striking are "The Years Between," as Maxwell describes McKay's verse from the twenties to the mid-thirties. During this fifteen-year stretch, McKay's lyrics versify the historical intersections between the Harlem Renaissance, modernist period leftism, anticolonial transnationalist negritude, and bohemian queer (...) ardor. Critics have regularly portrayed McKay as the first black intellectual to recant his Communism-and his repudiation is supposed to have taken place during the early 1920s. One startling fact that Maxwell's impressive scholarship illustrates is McKay's lyrical dedication to the international proletariat and Soviet State throughout not only the twenties but even into the thirties. Readers should find it illuminating, moreover, that McKay's praises to Communism are tangled up with an emergent African liberation struggle poetry and the advent of a black same-(...) love lyricism.

What's more, this edition annotates McKay's fascinating, generally unknown poetry clusters: the verse chronicle of his hospitalization during the early twenties that he referred to as "The Clinic"; the thirties' paeans to the "Cities" he inhabited; and the Catholic-inspired poems of the forties he called "The Cycle." To say that Maxwell's one-hundred-and-ten pages of annotations is thorough does not begin to express how valuable this collection is to various reading communities, including readers of poetry by black diaspora authors, verse by writers of the Left, writings by progressive-minded Catholic authors, and poetry by (...)queer voices. The appearance of Claude McKay's Complete Poems is indeed a historic event.