Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred previously unpublished works, this unique collection showcases the intellectual range of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose life and work were marked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.

| Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Claude McKay—Lyric Poetry in the Age of Cataclysm William J. Maxwell Jamaican Periodical Poetry, 1911-12 Songs of Jamaica (1912) Constab Ballads (1912) Early English and American Poetry, 1916-22 Harlem Shadows (1922) "The Clinic," circa 1923 "The Years Between," 1925-34 "Cities," circa 1934 "The Cycle," circa 1943 Final Catholic Poetry, 1945-47 Notes to the Poems Works Cited in the Notes Index of Titles Index of First Lines
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Harlem (New York, N, Y, ) Poetry, Jamaican Americans Poetry, Jamaica Poetry, Blacks Poetry|"A volume that no student of the Harlem Renaissance, the leftist interwar period, dissident sexuality studies, the Catholic worker movement, or negritude, diaspora, and Caribbean language literature can live without. . . . Maxwell's skillful salvaging of remote primary material, thorough scholarship, and original criticism substantially reconfigure how we understand the diaspora cruising author, rendering intelligible much that has mystified and sometimes disconcerted [us]. . . . A vital contribution to black studies."—African American Review
"Maxwell's introduction offers a fascinating overview of McKay's life and a spirited defense of his poetry."—Los Angeles Times
"Maxwell has edited this comprehensive volume superbly, hunting down every last poem. . . . [He] has deepened our sense of McKay's life and increased our respect for the independence of mind behind all his work."—Times Literary Supplement
|

A pioneer of black modernism, Claude McKay's varied and influential books include the poetry collections Harlem Shadows and Songs of Jamaica, and the novels Banjo, Home to Harlem, and Banana Bottom.

William J. Maxwell is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of the award-winning New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars.