Complete Poems: Claude McKay.

Complete Poems: Claude McKay Edited by William d. Maxwell University of Illinois Press, February 2004 $40, ISBN 0-252-02882-1

Whether it is true or not that Claude McKay derided Harlem NAACP officials in 1922, as "pseudo-intellectuals," is less important than what such lore suggests about the complexity of the poet's character.

When the remark was reported in Negro World, McKay vehemently denied it, but the event captures the tone of McKay's tenuous relationship with the Harlem elite--a community that would, nevertheless, celebrate him as a model of its cultural ambitions. A major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay imbued his poetry with similar seemingly contradictory impulses. The measure of his ambivalence is charted in his Complete Poems.

Born in 1889 in Jamaica, McKay was the youngest of 11 children, born to a successful, land-owning family. Yet he would often refer to his background as that of a peasant. Many of his early poems depict life and labor in rural Jamaica. He captures the Jamaican dialect in this early verse and valorizes the speech patterns of the working class. Despite his working-class sympathies, McKay's poems are consistently rendered in traditional European forms and meters.

Having grown up in the West Indies, McKay was spared some of the psychological violence of American racism. Perhaps this is why he had difficulty identifying with what his contemporary Zora Neale Hurston would refer to as the "sobbing school of Negrohood."

It is this sense of worldly entitlement and self-possession that informs his classic poem "If We Must Die:' Famously composed in response to the Red Summer of 1919 in which racial violence erupted across the United States, it is intentionally not context specific. This allowed Winston Churchill later to recite the poem as a means of inspiring his British troops--an ironic, though not unwelcome appropriation of the poem.

The conflicting values in McKay's work results from abundant devotions hamstrung by indifferent idols. This is how, for example, a young yet prescient McKay can write the poem titled "Passive Resistance," in which he threatens to "show an alien trust / Dat Jamaicans too can fight."

Complete Poems proceeds chronologically to highlight the poet's developments. McKay aspired to the highest standards in writing, even if these standards were set within European traditions. The mark of a McKay poem can be found in the painstaking balance of rhetoric, reason and wit or delight. Despite the sincere austerity, these poems benefit from McKay's uneasy relationship to the tradition he seeks to serve. His poem "The Mulatto" is emblematic of the relationship, which is described as:

   A hate that only kin can feel for kin,
   A hate that makes me vigorous and whole,
   And spurs me oil unceasingly to win.

McKay claimed to have "an outlaw soul that cannot reconcile itself to the tact of limitation to any one country, or allegiance to any one nation." Despite this rootlessness, his eminence in the Harlem Renaissance was secured with the 1922 publication of Harlem Shadows, where we find tender and evocative portraits of Harlem and its residents. It is interesting that McKay would be associated with the Harlem Renaissance at all, considering not only his emotional estrangement from Harlem literati, but his physical absence from the movement as well. What little time he spent in New York City, McKay was most often in Greenwich Village in the company of political radicals and Communists and was identified as a Communist agitator by the FBI.

After leaving the country in 1923, McKay was barred from major ports of entry until the intervention of politically connected Harlemites Walter White and lames Weldon Johnson. McKay was not allowed to return, however, until 1933. By this time, the Harlem vogue had waned.

On his return, McKay began to reflect on his travels, crafting poems in homage to cities across Africa, Europe and Russia. Although these are written for a popular audience and rarely display the more avant-garde concerns of modernism, McKay's genius is evident in his savvy and deft handling of history. Closer to Du Bois's generation than the younger Harlem Renaissance writers who privileged creative expression over cultural agenda, McKay would have agreed with the notion that art has social and political obligations first. But the poems in this period are not didactic, nor are they overrun with racial chauvinism.

In fact, McKay disdained literature" that followed racial themes. Ironically, it is this very tendency toward the universal that has made McKay's work so relevant to African American literature. That McKay turned to religious themes toward the end of his life suggests his ever-expanding sense of audience and his ever-shifting devotions. It also suggests the humility the poet acquired to resolve perhaps the most profound contradiction: how surrender might service the struggle.

--Reviewed by Gregory Pardlo