β Scribed by Claude McKay
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
In his 1918 autobiographical essay, "A Negro Poet Writes," Claude McKay (1889β1948), reveals much about the wellspring of his poetry.
"I am a black man, born in Jamaica, B.W.I., and have been living in America for the last years. It was the first time I had ever come face to face with such manifest, implacable hate of my race, and my feelings were indescribable β¦ Looking about me with bigger and clearer eyes I saw that this cruelty in different ways was going on all over the world. Whites were exploiting and oppressing whites even as they exploited and oppressed the yellows and blacks. And the oppressed, groaning under the leash, evinced the same despicable hate and harshness toward their weaker fellows. I ceased to think of people and things in the mass. [O]ne must seek for the noblest and best in the individual life only: each soul must save itself."
So wrote the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance, whose collection of poetry, Harlem Shadows...
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
James K. Baxter (1926-1972) is one of the twentieth-century's most remarkable poets, yet he has been too little regarded of outside his native New Zealand. In this innovative selection, Paul Millar, the expert on Baxter, gathers his most powerful and celebrated poems - political, lyrical and spiritu
Robert Bringhurst is one of the world's foremost mythologists and typographers, and #x93;without doubt a major poet." #x97;Poetry.;Cover; Title Page; Note to Reader; Dedication; Contents; The Beauty of the Weapons; The Beauty of the Weapons; Song of the Summit; Ararat; A Quadratic Equation; One Glyp
_Selected Poems_ draws together the best of Colette Bryce's highly acclaimed and prize-winning collections; including _The Heel of Bernadette_ (2000), winner of the Aldeburgh Prize, _The Full Indian Rope Trick_ (2004), short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize and _The Whole & Rain-domed Universe_,__ s
The patient, unhurried assembly of Eilean Ni Chuilleanain's ?rst collection resulted in an uncommonly accomplished debut. Poems from Acts and Monuments (1972) have already revealed their lasting power. In this timely retrospective they join generous selections from each of her subsequent books down
When Amy Clampitt's first collection, *The Kingfisher,* was published, it was hailed as that rare first book that "signals a major poet in full bloom" (*Los Angeles Times*). Its author was sixty-three years old. Over the next eleven years, Clampitt produced four additional, major collections. Now, t