Question

Who influenced Claude McKay a Jamaican-American Writer and poet? Please provide a reference thank you.

Answer 1

• Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay, was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems challenging white authority in America, and from generally straightforward tales of black life in both Jamaica and America to more philosophically ambitious fiction addressing instinctual/intellectual duality, which McKay found central to the black individual’s efforts to cope in a racist society.
• The son of peasant farmers, he was infused with racial pride and a great sense of his African heritage. His early literary interests, though, were in English poetry. Under the tutelage of his brother, schoolteacher Uriah Theophilus McKay, and a neighboring Englishman, Walter Jekyll, McKay studied the British masters—including John Milton, Alexander Pope, and the later Romantics—and European philosophers such as eminent pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, whose works Jekyll was then translating from German into English. It was Jekyll who advised aspiring poet McKay to cease mimicking the English poets and begin producing verse in Jamaican dialect. Jekyll convinced McKay to write in his native dialect, and then set some of McKay's verses to music. Jekyll helped McKay publish his first book of poems, Songs of Jamaica, in 1912.
• In Kingston he experienced and encountered extensive racism, probably for the first time in his life. His native Sunny Ville was predominantly populated by blacks, but in substantially white Kingston blacks were considered inferior and capable of only menial tasks. McKay quickly grew disgusted with the city’s bigoted society, and within one year he returned home to Sunny Ville.
• During his brief stays in Brown’s Town and Kingston McKay continued writing poetry, and once back in Sunny Ville, with Jekyll’s encouragement, he published the verse collections Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads in London in 1912.
• In these two volumes McKay portrays opposing aspects of black life in Jamaica. Songs of Jamaica presents an almost celebratory portrait of peasant life, with poems addressing subjects such as the peaceful death of McKay’s mother and the black people’s ties to the Jamaican land. Constab Ballads,however, presents a substantially bleaker perspective on the plight of Jamaican blacks and contains several poems explicitly critical of life in urban Kingston.