dicnol的部落格

One of the most grand poets of our instance Claude McKay was born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, British West Indies in September 15, 1889, as the youngest of xi offspring of his rustic parents in Jamaica, Thomas Francis and Ann Elizabeth (Edwards) McKay. McKay's kinfolk was rightly powerfully off having normative come to rest from the bride's and the groom's fathers.He. is primarily noted by his much-quoted sonnet: "If we Must Die" which was popularized during World War II by British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill.

Raised in Sunny Ville, in Clarendon Hills Parish by a merciful parent and a nonindulgent parent who passed on to his brood substantially of the Ashanti customs duty and traditions of Ghana where on earth he hailed from, his poesy demonstrates his immortal fidelity to his condition and a profound heart for Clarendon wherever he was born and raised. Such melancholy for Jamaica was incontestable even in his future poems once overseas.

His premature argot literary genre makes wistful references to the Clarendon Hills. His father, Thomas McKay, had e'er mutual near his family the subject matter of his own father's subjection desire thus to transfuse in them a clue of whites that would change state more than ever patent in the sacred text of his son. McKay's intense admiration for the denotation of federation encountered among countryfied Jamaican farmers and a a little skeptical noesis toward supernatural virtue pleased by his elderly brother, an easy academy teacher, left-hand an unerasable mark on his piece of writing labour.

At seventeen, McKay finished a government help became bound to a cabinet-maker in Brown's Town. At nineteen, unwinding on to Kingston, the capital, he united the Police Force where on earth his meek temperament acceptable its archetypical very good jar. For later West Indian Policemen were recruited more for their contractile organ than their brain, which they were matter-of-course to whoop it up and accolade every unit of time whilst on the fluff up.

The Police Force was for this reason not the unexcelled location for one like-minded McKay who was ever bothered by quality trouble. Two collections of blank verse that he published in 1912 emerged for the most part out of his submit yourself to as a personnel which he saved along next to urban existence in gross to be antagonistic. He felt uncomfortably sited relating the Jamaican limited and the excellent mass of the municipality impecunious. Many of the concerns that would be considerably of his next toil such as the hatred of the inner-city and the country, the snags of exile, and the fraction of the black intellectuals to their common folks occur first in these poems.

His ordinal paperback of poems of accent canto Constab Ballads accurately chronicles such experiences. His opening quantity of poems Songs of Jamaica was backhand single to improve his acrimonious ambience of status while in the compel. He sensibly keeps reprimanding those answerable for social group injustices to his ancestors. To free his feelings, he sought-after to author of redeeming features in the unlit illustration. His gentle personality led him to commiseration his people's torture and to object in opposition it. He gum olibanum got forced to confess himself by celebrating their high spirits and other favourable qualities. Their curiosity and spirit as human beings is enriched by their gaiety and corking subject matter which vibrates in maliciousness of by and large demoralising provisos.

His inclination for the criminals, whom he normally considered the victims of an foul body order, could not let him to pursue as a police peace officer farther than a year. During the succeeding two geezerhood hindmost at Clarendon Parish he was provoked to scribble Jamaican Dialect Poetry by Walter Jekyll, an English magpie of island traditional knowledge with whom McKay had counterfeit a close together association. Jekyll had introduced him to English poets specified as Milton and Pope.

In 1912 McKay published two volumes of verse Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. Songs of Jamaica beside an foreword and melodies by Jekyll to large it the in good taste spirit and the rawness of the Jamaican peasants who are confidentially guaranteed to their original dirtiness. Constab Ballads centres much on Kingston and the scornfulness and exercise suffered at hand by coloured blacks at the hands of whites and mulattos. These books ready-made McKay the primary achromatic to acquire the laurels of the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences near a sizeable lolly accolade which he was to use to fund his rearing at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the United States.

He seemed to have regretted later having been "an causal agency of body persecution in a peak inhumane deportment." In some industrial plant McKay made pervasive use of the Jamaican language, a slang of English.

When in 1912 McKay disappeared Jamaica for the U.S.A., it was fatal that this should organize to an epidemic of Negro sonnet from his pen. For present was a man near a prideful gist of his race, who had seen his relations pain in Jamaica and had fled an coniferous arrive with its luxuriantly waving palms crooked to the make necessary of the harsh equatorial winds in pursuance of more than opportunities in a more unequivocal global.

And he goes to America to draw together unthinkable Negro suffering. But instead than income tax return to the less testing enthusiasm of Jamaica, he material a duress to rest and connexion the struggle, for he was simply fly near the American blacks in their subjection. And no think. For McKay's rash years in New York were a case of growing racial bitterness, beside the procedure of the South. Negro dissatisfaction with Booker T. Washington and a ensuant fitting of the Negro attitude; the stretch in light-colored hysteria and violence, which was to go even harsher after the war which had been fought by them as well as in defence reaction of political orientation and the outgrowth of Garveyism and the struggle relating Garvey and the N.A.A.C.P. and others - all such as factors joint to bring down give or take a few the Negro Renaissance, of which McKay became an inherent subdivision.

McKay nonetheless kept up for a prolonged example a uninebriated hypersensitivity to his new and traumatic environment. Determined to keep the graciousness of his poet's calling, he refused to allow the part of his response as a poet to be perverted. He commonly refused to let his ambitions and snob value as a quality woman to be ruined. His verses remained strong conformation near the predominant vibes then, for those earlyish old age in America were really requisite old age for the Black explanation. But the virility of his rhyme is supported on more than specified enmity. It includes and depends on a sure cheerfulness - or contrarious transience attributable to McKay's dimensions to move to Negro torture not merely as a Negro, but as a quality mortal. For as he maintains, the magazine columnist essential ever contain this dimensions for a large and more basal recoil as a human existence to assert his human beings.

In so doing he would circumnavigate aerobatics his moving swelling and his stature as a human one. By distinguishing next to his own race, a communicator can carry on to that greater and more meaty credentials supported on his human beings so qualifying him to button "racial" textile.

"If We Must Die" hastily won popularity among Afroamericans, but the lowness of the Negro critics was excusatory. To them a literary composition that spoken the planted full of saving seemed just a superhuman chunk of discourtesy. William S Braithwaite whom McKay delineated as the dean of Negro critics denounced him as a "violent and hot under the collar propagandistic victimization his genre gifts to apparel [arrogant] and badly behaved thoughts." Whilst other messenger defined him as "rebellious and blistering."

McKay goes on to point out the lapses and failings in decent Negro evaluation and reprimand. This in bend brings in distortions and evasions in their study and internal representation of the civic realities revelation the texts.

This brought going on for the plain feeling in his love-hate association beside America. Having had no illusions nearly America and the education of its Negroes, he could at the one and the same juncture pay her the acclamation she deserved: one reflective some its request as all right as its unfriendly depression. which he lifeless endures as a obligatory test of his optimism. In paying her this award he triumphs finished his undefeated unfriendliness to the danger of magical rust America's 'hate' threatens to beginning within him. He could in so doing "stand inside her walls with not a smidgeon / Of terror, malice, not a speech of terror." Or as in "Through Agony," he refuses to stumble upon can't bear next to abhor. McKay so lasting his esteem for America in spite of the niggle which she caused.

McKay sees not one and only the bombing done to his own people, but that which the whites enforce on themselves as good. McKay is coloured by misery: in "The Castaway" where, on two legs in a ravishing park, he is attracted not by the perceptible delights of disposition but by "the castaways of earth," the unaccompanied and derelict, and turns distant in hopelessness. And it is mot explicit and does not situation if they are achromatic or albescent. In "Rest in Peace" his sentimental heart responds to the torture of his society as he bids word of farewell to a absent comrade.

McKay meets America's defy as man and versifier. He meets the stand up against which America's dislike intensely sets for his humanity, and in his conflict he flings support his confront to the forces of despise in "America." As lyricist and man he enforces self-denial which gives to his affliction a righteousness finished which his epic sometimes transcends group quarrel and becomes human besiege.

McKay's genre of course mirrored other feature of Negro spontaneous effect. This response is a new consciousness of the African connexion next Marcus Garvey's "Back to Africa" lobby. Intellectual Negro free verse was by this means distressing nearer to Africa spiritually. Garvey's phone call for a achromatic man's supernatural virtue was paralleled in disenchanted verse, So was his insisting on the outgoing glories of the Negro contest. So was the new pride he prompted in Negro good looks and so in everything black, design of which he sometimes put into instead unyielding couplet romanticizing Africa. McKay does the self in poems look-alike "Harlem Shadows."

When McKay arrived in America he registered in Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute with the fixed to search commercial enterprise noncontinuous his studies at Tuskegee Institute after lone two months location and out of disappointment. He registered at Kansas State College where on earth he remained until 1914. Then after two time of life he resumed his line of work as a biographer. He later went to new York where on earth close to Hughes he landed in Harlem. Whilst familiarising himself near the piece of writing area in New York, he backed up himself as a restaurant attendant and a porter from 1915 to 1918. His primary stopover came in 1917 once Waldo Frank, a Jewish activist novelist and cultural professional person published two of his sonnets "The Harlem Dancer" and "Invocation" in the December reason of The Seven Arts, a outstandingly venerated original public press.

Between 1918 and 1919, McKay went abroad, visited England and lived in London for more than a period. There he compiled Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920). In 1919, on his come flooding back to New York, McKay aligned the associates of Liberator public press as colleague skilled worker and persistent in that arrangement until 1922, a fundamental measure in which Max Eastman was past the trained worker. In 1922, McKay completed Harlem Shadows, a slog of rhyme considered a position of the Harlem Renaissance .

Short- fable dramatist Frank Harris who published individual of McKay's poems in Pearson's seems too to have made a crucial impress on the teenage writer. Unlike following achromatic writers, McKay did not swear mainly on specified periodicals as the Crisis and Opportunity as outlets for his verse. Though he wrote for black magazines occasionally, his writing ties were generally beside albescent publications, specially beside the left-wing magazines based in Greenwich Village. Indeed, Max Eastman, the academic administrator of the American written material moved out in the proto 20th century, published McKay's "The Dominant White" in the April 1919 put out of The Liberator and cardinal more of his poems in the July dynamic. McKay subsequent served as Eastman's editorial train tributary essays and reviews as cured as verse. He also befriended the infamous light-colored American poet Edward Arlington Robinson.

In 1919, he met George Bernard Shaw the British scriptwriter whilst guest England. G.K Ogden included well-nigh two xii of McKay's poems in the summer 1920 circulate of Cambridge Magazine. I.A. Richards, one of the world-class English writing critics of the 20th century, wrote the preamble for McKay's tertiary autograph album of verse, Spring in New Hampshire. According to Richards, McKay's was among the unsurpassed complex man produced in Great Britain afterwards.

On his flood back to the US, McKay perpetual to sweat for and alter to a numeral of publications with that of his feller Jamaican, Marcus Garvey, Negro World. The close year in 1922, he published his peak key genre collection, Harlem Shadows, thus literally inaugurating the Harlem Renaissance. That volume was a agency done which he could topographic point the fighting "If We Must Die" interior of a journal. This poem devoted by the cultural intimidation that racked America in 1919 taken as a war-like cry by dark radicals next served as one of the wildcat rallying cries of the Allied Forces in World War II, especially after state recited in an emotionally polar address past the House of Commons in riposte to Nazi Germany's danger of invasion during World War II. Harlem Shadows flawed a point of no return for individual written material information in Harlem who saw in McKay's masterful management of national issues demonstration that a black writer's insights into matters of competition could ladle on more than on occasional font as convincing subjects for rhyme.

That aforementioned twelvemonth McKay visited the USSR. For anyone moving in the civic natural virtue movement, McKay had turn a Communist, basic cognitive process that communism offered his cause greater anticipation. In 1923, in Moscow McKay addressed the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, as a black writer systema nervosum to the Soviet origination. He achieved flash quality among the labor as well as near Communist Party officials of the USSR. He was introduced to the Soviet body and had his verse form "Petrograd May Day, 1923" published in interlingual rendition in Pravda. Nevertheless, dismayed by the doctrinaire philosophical requirements of the Communist Party as regards all artistic productions, and peradventure a irrelevant dead beat of someone aerated as a novelty, and having to reduce his art to diplomatic info.

McKay heavily traveled commonly abroad. After visits to Berlin and Paris, he settled fallen in France for a period of time. He, however, remained in introduction near the expatriate free of American writers.

Whilst in France his first original Home to Harlem was produced in 1928 and career on his second Banjo was started. This final new-fangled was completed during his travels in Spain and Morocco in 1929.

In these two novels of the 1920s McKay investigated how the concepts of race and session worked in a international dominated by capitalism and colonialism, and how cosmopolitan and agrarian black communities can be reconciled to respectively other.

Home to Harlem. the preliminary bestseller innovative by an African-American that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature was reprinted v contemporary world in two months. It was more commercially proud than any original by an African American journalist to that spear. For it rewarded a consuming prying among Americans for records almost the nightlife and the stinker of Harlem. The fresh examines two characters who literally pilfer the scholar on a jaunt of Harlem. Jake, an African American longshoreman, a hedonist, and a World War 1 veteran, comeupance the service and returns to his treasured Harlem where on earth he waterfall in liking near a whore after she kindly and sneakily returns the currency he has remunerated her.

Through Jake we are introduced to Ray, a Haitian brainy colonial who worries unremittingly and feels isolated from the African American municipal as a upshot of his European tuition. He in that way envies Jake who is more spontaneous and steer. As for Ray, his own pining to become a dramatist interferes near his amusement of duration. The stern W.E.B. Du Bois was acid in denouncing McKay's concert of Harlem, declaring that the narrative "for the maximum subdivision nauseates me, and after the dirtier environs of its filth, I touch distinctly look-alike winning a hip bath." In response, McKay suspect Du Bois of failing to sort the seemly prominence "between the labor of party line and the tough grind of art."

Ray appears over again in Banjo near different "natural" black character, the African American performing artist Lincoln Agrippa Daily. Set in the old French left of Marseilles, this 2nd original of McKay features a shifting class of achromatic longshoremen sailors and drifters from Africa. As in his first, McKay articulates the necessitate for the exiled black analytical to come flooding back to his rampant black kin.

McKay's ordinal novel, Banana Bottom regarded mostly as his top-grade mythical victory takes the subject of the two above novels even further. It depicts likewise a black singular in white western civilization juxtaposing two divergent meaning systems - Anglo-Saxon culture versus Jamaican folk society. It tells the fiction of a Jamaican provincial girl, Bita Plant, who is rescued by white missionaries after mortal despoiled. In fetching safe place beside her new protectors she also becomes their unfortunate person with all their perceptiveness values mortal foisted upon her and her subdivision to their structured Christian revealing set of connections.

All this culminates in a botched stab to set her union to an aspirant vicar. But Bita escapes from him as he attempts to mustard her. But next overcoming the memory of mustard she returns to the citizens in their endemic town of Jubilee wherever she yet finds joy - fulfillment. She ends up gum olibanum rejecting European nation and the Jamaican elite, choosing to get together the rural common people. This new did not trademark by a long chalk of an mark on the language open consequently.

After cardinal years mobile finished Europe and North Africa, McKay returned to Harlem. Three age subsequent in 1937 he completed his autobiography, A Long Way from Home, in a useless crack to pillow his pecuniary and writing fortunes. His a little something in Roman Catholicism which was budding much during the 1940s after his rejection of marxism and officially fixed the place of worship in 1944. Though he wrote by a long chalk new poetry then, he bungled to publish any, a end he everlasting on the Communist Party in the U.S. ). His definitive practise Selected Poems (1953) was published posthumously.

From 1932 until his disappearance in Chicago 1948, McKay ne'er moved out the United States. His go in communalism dwindled, reported to Sister Mary Anthony: he had caught every of the psyche of that Catholic apostolate. And bit by bit he came to know for himself that in Catholicism lay the confidence of the race, indeed, of all the races. He was received into the Church in Chicago in October, 1944, by Bishop Bernard Sheil and is now on the backup of the Bishop Sheil School in that metropolitan area.

By the mid 1940s McKay's form had deteriorated and after eternal various illnesses, he died of bosom disaster in Chicago in 1948.

McKay's profession as a poet, novelist, and essayist has been wide seen as heralding respective of the peak probative moments in African American nation. His nag literary genre was seen by umteen as the prime trial of the "New Negro" fundamental nature. His novels were intelligent considerations of the hitches and possibilities of Pan-Africanism at the end of the body era, influencing writers of African descent end-to-end the worldwide. His early verse in Jamaican lingo and his literary composition set in Jamaica are now seen as requisite to the encouragement of a political unit Jamaican literature.