Octave – A group or stanza of eight lines of verse, (now) esp. the octet of a sonnet.
Below are a few key terms used on this page for readers who may not have encountered them before.Ĭouplet – A pair of successive lines of verse, esp. when rhyming together and of the same length. Every choice he made has meaning and looking at those choices are what lets us understand who he was and why he wrote as well as what he was writing about.Ĭertain literary terms are essential to understanding how McKay and other poets use the poetic tradition to express themselves. When McKay chose to write his poetry, he chose the form of his poems just like he chose the words and the subject. It’s important that we pay attention to form as well as meaning when we read McKay’s poetry because the two are very closely related. The musicality of the sonnet form made his poems absolutely sing with meaning.
Instead of seeing the guidelines of the sonnet form as something that would restrict him, McKay saw them as a way to “set his poetry free.” We know words can be much more powerful and memorable when rhymed, and the best way for McKay to emphasize the strong feelings he had about his life experiences was to place those poems in a form where the emphasis could be directed. In his essay, “Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows," Terence Hoagwood explains that McKay liked the traditional sonnet form because he felt it was the best way to express his feelings. The poems in these collections generally use traditional forms even as they engage in radical linguistic innovations. This led McKay to produce two books of vernacular poetry in Jamaican patois ( Constab Ballads and Songs of Jamaica). While in Jamaica, McKay was mentored by an Englishman named Walter Jekyll, who encouraged him to write poems about everyday life in Jamaica, using language characteristic of Jamaican peasants like the ones he grew up around - even if it might not be readily accessible to outsiders. As a child, McKay spent some time living with his oldest brother who was a teacher, and this could have exposed him to some classical writers who influenced his poetry (McKay began writing at age 10).
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His preference for traditional forms also separates McKay from many of his peers in the Harlem Renaissance who, like the modernists, often used free verse and turned to rhyme sporadically.īut why would McKay choose to write almost exclusively in a form that would set him apart from others who were writing about similar themes, of class, race, the changing values of modern urban existence, and changing values regarding sexuality? However, McKay quite deliberately opted for traditional form-rhyme and meter-in his poetry from this period, rejecting modernist aesthetics even as his poetry from the 1910s and 20s embraced what we might see as modern themes. When Claude McKay was writing his poetry, free verse was very much in fashion, and many of his peers in the emerging modernist movement were writing their poems in this form (among McKay's contemporaries were poets like Ezra Pound, T.S. Essay Author Jenna Casciano plain T14:49:48-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Essay Author: Jenna Casciano (Lehigh M.A. Early Uncollected Poetry (1911-1922) Uncollected Poems by Claude McKay published in Jamaican, British, and American magazines Workers Dreadnought Poetry Spring in New Hampshire (1920): Digital Edition Harlem Shadows (1922): Digital Edition Harlem Shadows Digital Edition Selected Poems of Claude McKay (1953) Approximating the Table of Contents of "Selected Poems of Claude McKay" Criticism and Contextual Essays Works Cited Works Cited for "Claude McKay's Early Poetry (1912-1922)" TEI/XML Editions (in progress/coming soon) Links to TEI versions of these texts Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Claude McKay and the Sonnet Form 1 T07:53:35-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 69 7 Contextual Essay. Claude McKay's Early Poetry (1911-1922) : A Digital Collection Main Menu Introduction: About this Site Amardeep Singh, Lehigh University Constab Ballads (1912) - Digital Edition Claude McKay's "Constab Ballads" Songs of Jamaica (1912): Digital Edition Book of poetry by Claude McKay. Please enable Javascript and reload the page. This site requires Javascript to be turned on.