Harlem Shadows

Claude McKay’s 1922 collection is usually named as the book that opened the Harlem Renaissance, and the reason is audible on the page. He wrote in strict inherited forms, sonnets above all, and filled them with anger, homesickness, and desire the form was never built to hold. “If We Must Die”, written after the racial violence of 1919, is here, and so are the Jamaican memories that pull against the cold Manhattan streets of the title poem. McKay is a poet of two places at once, at home in neither, and that tension gives the verse its charge. The poets who followed took the permission he created. Free PDF and EPUB edition available here.