Claude McKay. Complete Poems.

Claude McKay. Complete Poems. Ed. William J. Maxwell. American Poetry Recovery Series. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2004. 464 pp. $40.00.

Despite his reputation as the first Afro-Caribbean poet to write dialect poetry, as well as recognition for a few other categorical black firsts credits, Claude McKay remained until recent years a somewhat remote figure, particularly when arranged alongside such Harlem Renaissance leading lights as Du Bois, Hughes, and Hurston. Scholars presently are reassessing the poet through fertile new critical modes, however, and William J. Maxwell's gathering of McKay's Complete Poems, issued by the University of Illinois Press's American Poetry Recovery Series, materially enhances the cur rent flurry over the New Negro author. Complete Poems is 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 extensively annotated collection assembles all four of McKay's verse volumes, namely, his early Jamaican collections, Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912), the initially London-published Spring in New Hampshire (1920), and the poet's most spectacular assortment, Harlem Shadows (1922). Amassing over 300 poems, Maxwell's collection organizes each of McKay's lyrics according to the date of its composition, comprising "eighty-seven previously unpublished ... and sixty-one uncollected works" (xi), thereby giving a more coherent sense of McKay's poetic trajectory than was feasible without access to scattered archives. Until now, McKay's verse has been, as Maxwell says, "a poetry in hiding" (xix).

Drawing McKay's orphan poetry out of the shadows, however, obliges more than merely collecting overlooked works between covers for the first time: "Confronting [McKay's] poetry as a whole offers two sorts of productive novelty: discovery and recontextualization" (xxiii). Complete Poems gainsays several lingering assumptions about McKay's lyric effort, beginning with the misconception that the author abandoned writing poetry during the mid-1920s in favor of composing exclusively in prose. Starting in the 1920s and for each decade of his life thereafter, the New Negro poet generated canto-like thematic verse sequences. Laid up to recover from a toxic treatment for a venereal disease, McKay produced the previously unpublished Baudelaire-inflected cluster he titled "The Clinic" around 1923. "The Clinic" includes the subsequently published "The Desolate City" (1926), a poem that not only visits the blistered territory of The Waste Land (1922), but also looks forward to his next verse cycle. Known for venting his spleen, McKay generated the subsequent thematic batch, the "Cities" poems, around 1934, a grouping that Maxwell perfectly describes as "one of the most polemical, most resentful, and most candidly oddball sonnet cycles in twentieth-century literature" (xxiv). And the one-time bard of black Marxism produced the even more choleric anti-Communist, pro-Catholic sequence, "The Cycle," circa 1943, 20 years after he has been generally thought to be through with writing poetry. Indeed, rescuing McKay's neglected verse proposes a more ambitious project than even the vital work of retrieving the poetry of a major author: "This book's 323 poems ... aim to close the largest remaining gap in our evolving portrait of Claude McKay--and arguably the largest remaining gap in the historical record of black diasporan poetry as well" (xxii).

In addition to superb recovery work, Maxwell contributes the dividend of an alert, independent critical mind. "Claude McKay--Lyric Poetry in the Age of Cataclysm," Maxwell's lively introduction, brings a clearheaded reevaluation to McKay studies, starting with the insistent vexation over the poet's resolve to work in traditional forms. After his two Kingston collections of poetry McKay never again rendered into verse the basilectal creole speech of his native home, Clarendon Parish, and police beat, Spanish Town, Kingston. By choosing this course, McKay effectively decided against producing vernacular poetry at a time when versifying black idiomatic language and the folk fable was so much in vogue: the New Negro Renaissance. Nor did he generally take up related black modernist language experimentation techniques--free verse, blues, and jazz prosody--as did other New Negro poets, like Hughes and Sterling Brown. As those acquainted with "one of the landmark political poems of the twentieth century" (xxi), "If We Must Die" (1919), have probably already gathered, McKay's favored lyric form was the sonnet. Because of his supposedly stubbornly retrogressive style and for a few other reasons, critics have portrayed the author as a contradictory figure in black literary arts. But this persistent conceit about McKay's presumed retrograde aesthetic overlooks the poet's momentous literary cultural work, a dialect(ical) of modernism that Maxwell limns as the black author's "progressive, internationalizing impulse" (xxxi).

Querying McKay's revolutionary spirit prompts added reexamination. Complete Poems materially confronts assumptions about the duration of the author's internationalist commitment, challenging the notion that McKay recanted leftism by the mid-1920s, another impression that commonly persists. Such exultant poems as "The International Spirit," written in the year that McKay published his best-selling black proletarian novel, Home to Harlem (1928)--the same year that the Comintern's Sixth World Congress passed a resolution that African Americans in the US South constituted an "oppressed nation"--contest the orthodoxy that McKay chucked Leninism during the early 1920s. When placed according to each poem's original appearance, moreover, even McKay's widely anthologized, most familiar poems reclaim a surprising genesis. The document that has most effectively disseminated the notion that McKay broke with the Left by the early 1920s is the author's own anxiously revisionist memoir, A Long Way from Home (1937), published two years before he was questioned by a subcommittee of the Dies commission for subversion. But check out "Moscow," a sonnet McKay published in his repudiation autobiography (and in a somewhat different version, generated as one of the c. 1934 "Cities" poems): "Oh often now my heart throbs with the thrill, / When simply in that place [Red Square] I heard and saw / The human voice and presence of Lenin" (Complete Poems 229).

But it also may be misleading to see McKay's radicalism as instantaneously emerging at the moment he first walked up the subway stairs and encountered Harlem's vibrant--and exploited--colored masses. To retrace in the other genealogical direction, the origin of the New Negro author's revolutionary spirit seems to be already germinating in his Jamaican verse. In "Cudjoe Fresh from the Lecture" (1912), a narrator who carries the name of the legendary Maroon rebel leader follows Darwinian theory to its logical end, ascertaining that no mystical laws of inherited supremacy govern, and concludes that western scientific rationalism would enjoin blacks to overthrow white Christian domination. Even light verse like "The Biter Bit" (1912), with its comic struggle over a "calalu" plant, depicts the bleak situation of the black Jamaican colonized class living under "buccra"--and British Crown Colony--rule. In view of the imperatives of the Caribbean nation language poetry movement, it is understandable that Kamau Brathwaite has castigated "McKay's reliance on the imported rhythm of iambic pentameter" (xx). Yet without McKay's early Fabianist Jamaican "dialect" poetry united with his later Marxist incendiary sonnets, it is difficult to imagine the development of the Caribbean language verse of uprising, from the Ja "patwa" dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson to the stirring lyricism of the Bajan Brathwaite himself.

Where past critics were often dubious about McKay's crossings over into unsuitable political and literary contact zones, scholars have generally refused even to follow his deviations into homoerotic no-man's land. Until the last few years, critics essentially disregarded the manifestly manly author's sexual identity. McKay's particular sexuality has been signed as an eccentricity (and sometimes embarrassment) that was best exiled to the endnotes. Not merely homoerotic, as many are, a number of poems in this assemblage are openly queer--the designation queer inscribes sexual difference as a radical political condition--thereby exposing the modern state's repressive control over same-sex comradeship. The imagery depicting the hybrid culture in "Marrakesh" (c. 1934), another "Cities" poem, illustrates a chief reason why this Black Wilde resided in Morocco during the early 1930s: "African drum beat, oriental song, / Salome-sensual dance of jeweled boys" (227). Maxwell sees no contradiction in McKay's marriage of Mars--or Marx--and Eros: "Even McKay's shining 'hate lyrics' cannot refuse bohemian codes of expressive egoism and the cross-wiring of political and amorous dynamite. Read carefully, they anticipate the cocktail of sexual liberty" (xxvi). With the arrival of the Complete Poems, McKay's "poetry in hiding" has come out.

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 both McKay's adherents and his detractors. Whether a collision of contradictions or a fusion of polyphonic parts, Claude McKay's Complete Poems is a vital contribution to black studies.

Reviewed by

Gary E. Holcomb

Emporia State University