Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920) is a poetry collection by Claude Mc Kay. Published toward the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems is the first of Mc Kay’s collections to appear in the United States. As a committed leftist, Mc Kay—who grew up in Jamaica—captures the life of African Americans from a realist’s point of view, lamenting their exposure to poverty, racism, and violence while celebrating their resilience and cultural achievement. Several years before T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All (1923), modernist poet Claude Mc Kay troubles the traditional symbol of springtime to accommodate the hardships of an increasingly industrialized world. In “Spring in New Hampshire, ” the poet gives voice to a desperate laborer, for whom the beauty and harmony of the season of rebirth are not only sickening, but altogether inaccessible: “Too green the springing April grass, / Too blue the silver-speckled sky, / For me to linger here, alas, / While happy winds go laughing by, / Wasting the golden hours indoors, / Washing windows and scrubbing floors.” A master of traditional forms, Mc Kay brings his experience as a black man to bear on a poem otherwise dedicated to descriptions of natural beauty, challenging the very tradition his language and style invoke. In “The Lynching, ” he calls on the reader to witness the brutality of American racism while exposing the complicity of those who would look without feeling: “[S]oon the mixed crowds came to view / The ghastly body swaying in the sun: / The women thronged to look, but never a one / Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue…” As children dance around the victim’s body, “lynchers that were to be, ” Mc Kay raises a terrible, timeless question: how long will such violence endure? This edition of Claude Mc Kay’s Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems is a classic of Jamaican literature reimagined for modern readers.
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Sobre o autor
Claude Mc Kay (1889-1948) was a Jamaican poet and novelist. Born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, Mc Kay was raised in a strict Baptist family alongside seven siblings. Sent to live with his brother Theo, a journalist, at the age of nine, Mc Kay excelled in school while reading poetry in his free time. In 1912, he published his debut collection Songs of Jamaica, the first poems written in Jamaican Patois to appear in print. That same year, he moved to the United States to attend the Tuskegee Institute, though he eventually transferred to Kansas State University. Upon his arrival in the South, he was shocked by the racism and segregation experienced by Black Americans, which—combined with his reading of W. E. B. Du Bois’ work—inspired him to write political poems and to explore the principles of socialism. He moved to New York in 1914 without completing his degree, turning his efforts to publishing poems in The Seven Arts and later The Liberator, where he would serve as co-executive editor from 1919 to 1922. Over the next decade, he would devote himself to communism and Black radicalism, joining the Industrial Workers of the World, opposing the efforts of Marcus Garvey and the NAACP, and travelling to Britain and Russia to meet with communists and write articles for various leftist publications. Mc Kay, a bisexual man, was also a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, penning Harlem Shadows (1922), a successful collection of poems, and Home to Harlem (1928), an award-winning novel exploring Harlem’s legendary nightlife.
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