Claude McKay was born in 1890 in a little thatched house of two rooms in a beautiful valley of the hilly middle-country of Jamaica. … his poems are forever homeward yearning—in the midst of their present passion and strong will into the future ….They carry a thrill into the depth of our hearts. Perhaps in some sense they are thoughts of a mother. At least it seems inevitable that we should find among them those two sacred sonnets of a child’s bereavement. It seems inevitable that a wonderful poet should have had a wise and beautiful mother.

Indeed the memory of Claude McKay’s family goes back on his mother’s side beyond the days of bondage, to a time in Madagascar when they were still free, and by the grace of God still “savage.” He learned in early childhood the story of their violent abduction, and how they were freighted over the seas in ships, and sold at public auction in Jamaica. He learned another story, too, which must have kindled a fire that slept in his blood—a story of the rebellion of the members of his own family at the auction-block. A death-strike, we should call it now—for they agreed that if they were divided and sold away into different parts of the country they would all kill themselves. And this fact solemnly announced in the market by the oldest white-haired Negro among them, had such an effect upon prospective buyers that it was impossible to sell them as individuals, and so they were all taken away together to those hills at Clarendon which their descendants still cultivate. With the blood of these rebels in his veins, and their memory to stir it, we cannot wonder that Claude McKay’s earliest boyish songs in the Jamaica dialect were full of heresy and the militant love of freedom, and that his first poem of political significance should have been a rally-call to the street-car men on strike in Kingston. He found himself by an instinctive gravitation singing in the forefront of the battle for human liberty.

In America McKay attended school at the Tuskeegee Institute and then agricultural college in Kansas with the intention of returning to Jamaica. He left college in 1914 a poet and politically committed “a vagabond with a purpose”.

I came to complete my education. But after a few years of study at the Kansas State College I was gripped by the lust to wander and wonder. The spirit of the vagabond, the demon of some poets, had got hold of me. I quit college.I had no desire to return home. A Long Way From Home

“Tropics in New York” tells of looking in a shop window and being overcome with emotion at things that bring back the past. For McKay that meant his home in Jamaica and also perhaps the language and life he had left behind. His early poems were written in Jamaican dialect and he had a gift for writing in the natural speech of his people. He also had an extraordinary gift and affinity with the forms and language of the traditional poetic canon.

“I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.”

And I was reminded of another poem of tearing nostalgia that ends in tears – “Piano” by D.H.Lawrence where the sound of a woman’s singing transports him back to a childhood scene and to his mother. “I weep like a child for the past.”

The poem is a Freudian’s delight but at least there are no leaping loins. 

McKay (1889-1948) was a great admirer of Lawrence (1885-1930) and of course they were contemporaries. 

In his autobiography, he wrote:

D.H.Lawrence was the modern writer I preferred above any….

In D.H.Lawrence I found confusion—all of the ferment and torment and turmoil, the hesitation and hate and alarm, the sexual inquietude and the incertitude of this age, and the psychic and romantic groping for a way out.

Some of my friends thought I showed a preference for D.H.Lawrence because he was something of a social rebel. But it was impossible for me seriously to think ofLawrence as a social thinker, after having studied the social thinking of creative writers like Ruskin, William Morris,Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw, and other social propagandists. In fact, Lawrence’s attitude toward his subject matter, his half-suppressed puritanism, often repelled me. What I loved was the Laurentian language, which to me is the ripest and most voluptuous expression of English since Shakespeare.  A Long Way From Home (1937)

McKay felt a psychic kinship with Lawrence that was based on their parallel lives of restless travel, struggle for identity and alienation from a hostile society. When Lawrence died in 1930 McKay wrote,” … it was very sad to hear of D.H.Lawrence’s death. Although I never met him, it was like losing a close friend.”

Beyond bursting into tears and writing about it the two writers had something else in common: The Cambridge literary critic and scholar I.A. Richards. But I’m saving that for another post.

Photo by Arturo Rivera on Unsplash