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Claude McKayA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The poem’s form reveals that McKay understands his working-class audience. Despite McKay’s childhood growing up amid the evidence of the socio-political damage incurred by Jamaica—really the entire Caribbean Basin—after two centuries of ruthless British colonial occupation, and despite his dissatisfaction with the status quo in his adopted (white) America, McKay elects to case his concern over the oppression of the capitalist culture through the vehicle of poetic forms grounded in the very British/white culture that so plagued his world.
One reason for McKay’s poetic form choices is that they elevate the quiet tragedies of the American working-class “stiff.” The poem looks like a poem, scans like a poem. It is executed in three octets (eight-line stanzas), with rhyming couplets in between each octet that echo one another and use the rhyme device of “tired” and “hired” (Lines 9, 10, 19, 20, 29, 30), creating a sort of refrain to the poem. How best to capture the poet’s sense of loss, the emptiness he feels trapped within the soul-draining routine of his working world? The poem rejects the idea of pitying the speaker by delivering his dilemma in a poetic form that creates from his yearning, his sense of living death, and his deep frustration over the limits of his life a stately and grand form.
By Claude McKay
America
America
Claude McKay
Home To Harlem
Home To Harlem
Claude McKay
If We Must Die
If We Must Die
Claude McKay
The Harlem Dancer
The Harlem Dancer
Claude McKay
The Lynching
The Lynching
Claude McKay
The Tropics in New York
The Tropics in New York
Claude McKay
The White House
The White House
Claude McKay
To One Coming North
To One Coming North
Claude McKay
When Dawn Comes to the City
When Dawn Comes to the City
Claude McKay