By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘America’ is a 1921 poem by Claude McKay (1889-1948), a Jamaican-American poet who is often regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance.
In ‘America’, McKay offers an ambivalent and deeply critical appraisal of the United States of America in the 1920s. Let’s go through the poem section by section to summarise its meaning before offering an analysis of its imagery and its context.