Unfree love: Claude McKay's lyric interruptus

Few accounts of the Harlem Renaissance, the most significant artistic movement in African-American history, fail to link its failings to the figure of the bohemian, the type of the free-living antibourgeois artist invented in the Romantic ideology of mid-nineteenth-century Europe. By contrast, this essay suggests that the bohemian community of Greenwich Village, a New York neighborhood far south of Harlem, was in fact a crucial incubator of the black renaissance. Considering the case of the Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay (1889-1948), I argue that some pioneering Harlem Renaissance verse is also an opinionated contribution to the conversational community of Village bohemia. In particular, I make the case that the love poems in McKay's Harlem Shadows (1922), the most influential early book of black poetic modernism, cannot communicate without being heard as meta-lyrics of the "lyrical left," the political edge of Village bohemianism that aimed to break down the barriers between contemplation and action, sexual and economic liberation, the artist's studio and the revolutionary barricades. Returned to the talkative territory of Village bohemianism, these neglected love poems disclose the public value in questioning some of the private-to-public relays then assumed in bohemian wisdom. In this questioning, as much as in McKay's tribute to New Negro militancy, his verse can be said to have plotted Harlem's Renaissance.