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.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘If We Must Die’ is a poem by Claude McKay (1889-1948), a Jamaican-American poet who is often regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. The poem was originally published in The Liberator magazine in 1919, and was reprinted in McKay’s 1922 collection, Harlem Shadows, which arose from McKay’s urge to place ‘If We Must Die’, as he put it, ‘inside of a book.’
Festus Claudius McKay (1889-1948), better known as Claude McKay, was a Jamaican-American writer and an important poet in the Harlem Renaissance which also included Langston Hughes. McKay was an atheist (‘a pagan’, as he himself puts it), but one who could enjoy the scent of the Easter lily though he cannot believe in the Easter story. This is what ‘The Easter Flower’ is about.
The Easter Flower
Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly
My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,
Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily
Soft-scented in the air for yards around;