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One of the greatest poets of our time was Claude McKay in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, British West Indies on September 15, 1889, the youngest of eleven children of parents in Jamaica Bauer, Thomas Francis and Elizabeth Ann (Edwards) McKay. McKay family was quite well with the country received from the bride and groom fathers.He. is mainly known for his much-quoted sonnet: "If we die," that during the Second War, the British prime minister, Sir popularWinston Churchill.
Raised in Sunny Ville, in Clarendon Hills Parish by a compassionate mother and a stern father who passed on to his children much of the Ashanti customs and traditions of Ghana where he hailed from, his poetry demonstrates his undying attachment to his roots and a deep affection for Clarendon where he was born and raised. Such nostalgia for Jamaica was demonstrated even in his later poems when abroad.
His early dialect verse makes nostalgic references to the Clarendon Hills. His father, Thomas McKay, had always shared with his children the story of his own father’s enslavement seeking thus to instill in them a suspicion of whites that would become particularly evident in the writings of his son. McKay’s profound respect for the sense of community encountered among rural Jamaican farmers and a somewhat skeptical attitude toward religion encouraged by his older brother, an elementary school teacher, left an indelible mark on his literary Work.
With seventeen years McKay was established by a government, sponsorship Carpenters in Brown's Town in teaching. At nineteen, the implementation of Kingston, the capital, became part of the police, where her sweetness is its first big jolt. Why then West Indian policemen recruited more for the muscles that the brain, which is expected to celebrate and honor per hour, while on the beat.
The police were therefore not the best choice for someone like McKay, thehas become increasingly disturbed by human suffering. Two collections of poems published in 1912 was in large part from his experience as the gendarmerie, was held together with the alienated urban life in general. He felt uneasy lies between the elite of Jamaica and the masses of urban poor. Many of the concerns that many of his later works, which were occupied as the strength of the city and country in which the problems of exile, and the ratio of blacks to their intellectualcommon folks appear first in these poems.
His second volume of poems of dialect verse Constab Ballads accurately records such experiences. His first volume of poems Songs of Jamaica was written only to relieve his bitter feelings of guilt while in the force. He calmly keeps reprimanding those responsible for social injustices to his people. To relieve his feelings, he sought to write of redeeming features in the dark picture. His gentle nature led him to pity his people’s suffering and to protest against it. He thus got compelled to relieve himself by celebrating their cheerfulness and other positive qualities. Their interest and vitality as human beings is enriched by their cheerfulness and good humor which vibrates in spite of generally dispiriting conditions.
His sympathy for the criminals, whom he often considered the victims of an unjust colonial order, could not allow him to work as a police constable beyond a year. During the ensuing two years back at Clarendon Parish he was encouraged to write Jamaican Dialect Poetry by Walter Jekyll, an English collector of island folklore with whom McKay had forged a close relationship. Jekyll had introduced him to English poets such as Milton and Pope.
In 1912 McKay published two volumes of poetry Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. Songs of Jamaica with an introduction and melodies by Jekyll to celebrate the unpretentious nature and the simplicity of the Jamaican peasants who are closely bonded to their native soil. Constab Ballads centres more on Kingston and the contempt and exploitation suffered there by dark-skinned blacks at the hands of whites and mulattos. These books made McKay the first black to receive the medal of the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences with a substantial cash award which he was to use to fund his education at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the United States.
He seemed to have regretted later having been “an agent of colonial Suppression so brutal. "In both works, McKay has made full use of the Jamaican language, a dialect of English.
As in 1912, McKay from Jamaica to the United States, it was inevitable that this should lead to an outbreak of Negro verse from his pen. Hence, there was a man with a sense of pride in his race, he saw his people are suffering in Jamaica and had an evergreen landscape with its lush swaying palms turn to escape the force sustained winds of tropical looking for moreopportunities in a more open world.
And he goes to America to meet unimaginable Negro suffering. But rather than return to the less demanding life of Jamaica, he felt a compulsion to remain and join the struggle, for he was already bound with the American blacks in their bondage. And no wonder. For McKay’s early years in New York were a time of growing racial bitterness, with the stiffening of the South. Negro disillusionment with Booker T. Washington and a consequent adjustment of the Negro attitude; the increase in white hysteria and violence, which was to become even harsher after the war which had been fought by them as well as in defence of democracy and the rise of Garveyism and the hostility between Garvey and the N.A.A.C.P. and others – all such factors combined to bring about the Negro Renaissance, of which McKay became an integral part.
McKay however maintained for a long time a sober reaction to his new and disturbing environment. Determined to maintain the dignity of his poet’s calling, he refused to allow the quality of his reaction as a poet to be warped. He equally refused to allow his ambitions and status as a human being to be destroyed. His verses remained virile keeping with the prevailing atmosphere then, for those early years in America were really crucial years for the Black cause. But the virility of his verse is based on more than mere bitterness. It includes and depends on a certain resilience – or stubborn humanity traceable to McKay’s capacity to react to Negro suffering not just as a Negro, but as a human being. For as he maintains, the writer must always retain this capacity for a larger and more basic reaction as a human being to maintain his humanity.
In so doing he would avoid stunting his emotional growth and his stature as a human being. By identifying with his own race, a writer can proceed to that greater and more meaningful identification based on his humanity thus qualifying him to handle “racial” material.
“If We Must Die” immediately won popularity among Afroamericans, but the tone of the Negro critics was apologetic. To them a poem that voiced the deep-rooted instinct of self-preservation seemed merely a daring piece of impertinence. William S Braithwaite whom McKay described as the dean of Negro critics denounced him as a “violent and angry propagandist using his poetic gifts to clothe [arrogant] and defiant thoughts.” Whilst another disciple characterized him as “rebellious and vituperative.”
McKay goes on to point out the lapses and failings in respectable Negro opinion and criticism. This in turn brings in distortions and evasions in their representation and interpretation of the social realities informing the texts.
This brought about the apparent ambivalence in his love-hate relationship with America. Having had no illusions about America and the experience of its Negroes, he could at the same time pay her the tribute she deserved: one reflecting both his charm and bitter desolation. he still resists as a necessary proof of his resistance. In this tribute, which pays his triumphs with its successful resistance against the threat of hatred threatens America's intellectual corrosion 'in it to begin. It was therefore not "in its walls, with the lowest level / terror, malice, not a word of fear." Or, as in "The Agony," refuses to hate each other to do with hate. McKay to continue his admiration for America, despite the pain, theit causes.
McKay sees not only the violence against his people did, but what the white people inflict on themselves as well. McKay is touched by poverty in "The Castaway", where available in a beautiful park, is not attracted by the visual pleasures of nature, but for "the survivors of the Earth, the lonely and abandoned, and changes in poverty. And it is clear , mot and no matter if you are white or blacks. In responding, "Rest in Peace," his tender heart for the suffering of his peopleHe died in farewell to a friend.
McKay meets the challenges of America as a man and a poet. He takes up the challenge, which is to hate America for its humanity and its strength has again thrown his challenge to the forces of hate in "America." As a poet, and he puts it, that is a dignity to his grief through his verses sometimes the man goes beyond racial protest and protest.
Poetry McKay certainly reflects another aspect of the response Negro. ThisThe answer is a new awareness of the African context, the following text: "Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa" appeal. Negro Spiritual Poetry moves even closer in spirit in Africa. Garvey called for religion, a black man had advanced in parallel lines, as was his insistence on the past glories of the Negro race. Thus, the new pride, encouraged Negro in beauty and in fact all in black, the ideas, which sometimes put in a rather indifferent towards romanticizing Africa. McKaythe same as in the poems, "Harlem Shadows".
McKay, when he arrived in America, he enrolled in Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute with the intention to study agriculture at Tuskegee Institute from studies interrupted after only two months there and frustration. He enrolled at Kansas State College, where he remained until 1914. Then, after two years he resumed his career as a writer. Then he went to New York, where, like Hughes, ended up in Harlem. While familiarity with the literatureScene in New York has earned as a waiter and porter, 1915-1918. His first breakthrough came in 1917 when Waldo Frank, a radical jew writer and art critic, has published two of his poems, "The Harlem Dancer" and "Invocation" in the December issue of the seven arts, a highly respected avant avant-garde magazine.
Between 1918 and 1919, McKay went abroad in England and has lived in London for more than a year. There, the spring in New Hampshire and other preparationsPoems (1920). In 1919, after his return to New York City, McKay joined the staff of Liberator magazine as associate editor and continued in that position until 1922, a period which was then the director of Max Eastman. In 1922, McKay, Harlem Shadows, a work of poetry, as a cornerstone of the Harlem Renaissance.
Frank Harris's short stories, poems different McKay Pearson also seems an important impression on the young poet made public. Black In contrast to laterWriter, McKay has left primarily to the period as crisis and market opportunities for its verses. Although sometimes black magazines for its literary connections were for publications mostly white, particularly with the newspapers left in Greenwich Village. Published, in fact, Max Eastman, the dean of American literary left early twentieth century, McKay's "The White dominant" in April 1919 of The Liberator, and ninehis poems in the July issue. McKay also served as an editorial Eastman posting essays and reviews, as well as poetry. He made friends with the famous white American poet Edward Arlington Robinson.
In 1919 he met the English playwright George Bernard Shaw during your visit to England. GK Ogden containing nearly two dozen poems McKay in the summer of 1920 edition by Cambridge Magazine. IA Richards, one of the leading British literary critic of the twentieth century, wrote the forewordfor the third book of poems McKay, Spring in New Hampshire. According to Richards, McKay was among the best works produced in Britain then.
After his return to the United States, McKay continued to work and contribute to a series of publications, including his colleagues in Jamaica, Marcus Garvey, Negro World. A year later, in 1922, he published his most important collection of poems, Harlem Shadows, and then practically the opening of the Harlem Renaissance. The book was a means by whichHe could have put the militant "If we must die" in a book. The sonnet of racial violence that broke America in 1919, interpreted as a war cry, as inspired by radical black later as one of the unofficial rally was shouting from the Allies in World War II, especially after her in a emotional speech to speak the House of Commons in response to the threat of invasion by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Harlem Shadows marked a point of no return for manyWriters in Harlem, he saw the masterful handling of racial issues McKay evidence that a black writer could provide insights into issues of race at a more suitable subject for poetry.
That same year, McKay went to the USSR. Active in the movement for social justice, McKay became a communist to believe that communism offered his cause hopeless. In 1923, John McKay Moscow, the fourth Congress of the Communist International directly, asunderstanding the cause of Soviet poet black. He achieved instant popularity of the proletariat, as well as with officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. E 'was he who made the Soviet leadership, and had his poem "Petrograd May Day 1923" in the translation published in Pravda. However, alarmed by rigid ideological demands of the Communist Party in relation to all artistic productions, and perhaps a little 'tired, as first, and to subjugate his art to politicsPropaganda.
McKay traveled extensively abroad. After living in Berlin and Paris, he moved to France for a decade. However, he remained in contact with the expatriate community of American writers.
While in France, his first novel, Home to Harlem was established in 1928 and work has begun his banjo seconds. This latest novel was completed during his travels in Spain and Morocco in 1929.
Investigated in these two novels of 1920, McKay, as the concepts of race and classcharacterized in a world of capitalism and colonialism was and how cosmopolitan and rural communities, black can be reconciled.
At home in Harlem. The first best-selling novel by an African-American, won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature has been reprinted five times in two months. It 'was a commercial success than any other novel by African American author at this time. Because it satisfies a curiosity for information on the consumption of American nightlife andThe Lowlife of Harlem. The novel examines two characters literally the reader on a journey through Harlem. Jake, an African American longshoremen, a hedonist, and a veteran of World War 1 who deserted the army and returned to his beloved Harlem, where he falls in love with a prostitute after hiding the love and the money paid , no.
With Jake, we are isolated to Ray, the Haitian intellectual ?migr?s who worries and feels continually introduced by the AfricanAmerican Community, as a result of his European training. Was so jealous of Jake, who is spontaneous and direct. Ray, his desire to become a writer to interfere with his enjoyment of life. The back of WEB Du Bois, denounced the presentation of Harlem corrosive McKay says that the book "Most of me is sick, and after the most bedraggled, I feel very much like taking a bath. " In response, McKay has accused Du Bois did not take the proper distinction"between the work of propaganda and the work of art."
Ray reappears in Banjo with another "natural" black, African American musicians Lincoln Agrippa Daily. French in the Old Port, is located, this second novel by McKay has a group of sailors moving blacks and longshoremen vessel from Africa. As in her first articulated the need for McKay, the exiled spiritual return to his usual black people black.
McKay's third novel, Banana Bottom viewsgenerally regarded as his best performance of the notional subject of two previous novels, it takes even more. It also shows a person of color in white Western culture, the juxtaposition of two opposing value systems – the Anglo-Saxon civilization versus Jamaican popular culture. It tells the story of the wife of a farmer Jamaica, Bita Plant, saved by the white missionaries for rape. In the resort with her new protector of their prisoners, which will also, with all its cultural values, which requiredthey and their introduction into their organized Christian education.
All this culminates in a misguided attempt to arrange their marriage with a priest trainee. Bita, but his absence when he tried to rape her. But later, the memory of the conquest of the rape of their return to the people in his hometown, where he finally finds happiness Anniversary – completion. Concludes with the rejection of European culture and the Jamaican elite, the choice for agriculture people to join. This novel is notthen make a big impression on the audience of readers.
After twelve years of wandering through Europe and North Africa, McKay returned to Harlem. Three years later, in 1937 he completed his autobiography, A Long Way from Home, in a vain attempt to strengthen its financial structure and literary. His interest in the Roman Catholic Church, which is always evident in 1940, after his rejection of communism and officially into the Church in 1944. Although he wrote many new gasket thenfailed to publish a breakdown has accused the Communist Party of the United States). His last work Selected Poems (1953) was published posthumously.
Post from 1932 until his death in Chicago in 1948, McKay never the United States. His interest in communism waned after Sister Mary Anthony: he had caught something of the spirit of Catholic apostolate. Gradually, he came for themselves acknowledge that Catholicism was the hope of the race, indeed of all races. Receivedchurch in Chicago in October 1944, by Bishop Bernard Sheil and is now on the staff of Bishop Sheil school in this city.
Until the mid-1940s, McKay health had deteriorated, and after enduring several diseases, died of a heart attack in Chicago in 1948.
McKay's work as a poet, novelist, essayist, and was often seen as messengers of some of the highlights of the African American culture. His poems have been protests by many as the clearest example of the "NewReflection spirit Negro. His novels were sophisticated about the challenges and opportunities of Pan-Africanism at the end of the colonial era, influencing writers of African descent throughout the world. His first poems in Jamaican patois and his fiction in Jamaica are set for now see as critical to the development of a national literature Jamaica.
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