[Stanley Shott's analysis (in "Langston Hughes: The Minstrel as Artificer," Journal of Modern Literature, 1974))] of two versions of the controversial "Christ in Alabama" identifies only the poet's desire to make it more "universal and less personal," qualities Schatt associates with greater artistry. The first version appeared in the December 1, 1931, issue of Contempo and was reprinted without change the following year in the political booklet Scottsboro, Limited; the second version appeared in The Panther and the Lash (1967).

To what extent did Pound commit himself during the 1930s not only to Mussolini as a leader but also to fascism as an ideology? And to what extent do the cantos which he wrote during this period serve as a vehicle for such an ideology?

[….]

The following is Pound's Introduction to his translation of  Remy de Gourmont's The Natural Philosophy of Love

"Il y aurait peut-être une certain corrélation entre la copulation complète et profonde et le développement cérébral."

The work of Du Bois and Johnson undoubtedly set the tone for the imagery of entrapment and despair in the northern metropolis that permeates the poetry of Jamaican-born Claude McKay, an immigrant like Du Bois and Johnson in the American city famed for its "openness" to outsiders. McKay reached New York in spring 1914, already embittered by two years in the South and Midwestern plains of Kansas over the cruel race prejudice for which his Jamaican upbringing had not prepared him.

From the moment of his arrival in the United States in 1912, then, to the beginning of his twelve year excursion abroad in 1922, McKay struggled to find a place for himself in America. Many of the poems that he wrote during this period reflect a profound and distressing alienation from his adopted culture.

The Negro Problem does not resolve itself into the problem of Negros living among white men but rather of Negros exploited, enslaved, despised by a colonialist, capitalist society that is only accidentally white.

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

The first sonnet McKay published in The Catholic Worker–"Look Within" (in the January 1945 issue)—is a prayer for strength to speak out against "the Fascist yoke / Of these United States" during its accordingly hypocritical war against European fascism (ll. 5-6). It offers an intriguing counterpoint to another poem on World War II (published four and a half years earlier) by Edna St. Vincent Millay, McKay’s partner in revamping and de-romanticizing the English sonnet tradition, whom he met in France after his trip to the Soviet Union.

“The Lynching” opens with the ascension of the victim’s “Spirit” to his “father” in “high heaven.” It continues in this vein to offer what most readers (including McKay himself) would consider a patently inadequate explanation for the lynching:

His Spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven.

His father, by the cruelest way of pain,

Had bidden him to his bosom once again; 

"The Lynching" speaks to the cultural cancellation of the African-American race in the 1920s. Its form is a striking variation on the Italian sonnet. Much of the Italian sonnet's aesthetic appeal is its ability to go slowly, cruise the reader through a description and then a calm conclusion, in contrast to the quick abab rhymes and epiphany of  the final couplet (gg) in a Shakespearean (or the variant Spenserian) sonnet. Accordingly, the octave in this poem follows the traditional Italian form, rhyming abbacddc. The concluding sestet breaks form, rhyming effegg.

[Textual note: “The Negro’s tragedy” was first published without this title in the July-August issue of The Catholic Worker, where it is followed by “I turn to God for greater strength to fight” and “Around me roar and crash the pagan isms”.]