Claude McKay

Scholars and style makers have long debated the birth date of the Harlem or "New Negro" Renaissance, the primary laboratory of Afro-modernist literature. Yet few have doubted the identity of the poem that served as this renaissance's inaugural address: Claude McKay's anthemic Shakespearian sonnet "If We Must Die. " McKay followed the tracks of the African American Great Migration to New York City in 1914. McKay's "violent sonnets, " poems defying the Victorian fallacy that antagonism is fundamentally unpoetic, have dominated talk of his importance to African American literature in the post-Renaissance era. Interestingly, the stylistic modernism of McKay's work remains less established than that of Hughes. The Jamaica-to-Harlem range of McKay's complete poems, however, emphasizes that his mature palette of conventions represented a self-assertive choice, even a selfmodernizing one. The stylistic path of McKay's poetry appears to rewind time, to repeat the larger history of modern black poetry in reverse.