Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (Black Narratives) - Softcover

McKay, Claude

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1513299905 ISBN 13: 9781513299907

Verlag: Mint Editions, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920) is a poetry collection by Claude McKay. Published toward the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems is the first of McKay’s collections to appear in the United States. As a committed leftist, McKay―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 McKay 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, McKay 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,” McKay raises a terrible, timeless question: how long will such violence endure?

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Claude McKay (1889-1948) was a Jamaican poet and novelist. Born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, McKay was raised in a strict Baptist family alongside seven siblings. Sent to live with his brother Theo, a journalist, at the age of nine, McKay 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. McKay, 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.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

“Too green the springing April grass, / Too blue the silver-speckled sky, / For me to linger here, alas, / While happy winds go laughing by.” Amid so much beauty, the speaker is unable to escape the daily reality of backbreaking work, the nights of sheer exhaustion. Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems is a poetry collection by Claude McKay.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Mint Editions
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1513299905
• ISBN 13: 9781513299907
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 42
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland