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.

Consider "The White City" originally printed in the October 1921 Liberator. In lieu of the application in "If We Must Die" of negative emotion to the positive end of joining kinsmen in struggle, this sonnet argues for hate as good medicine for a single black soul:

I will not toy with it nor bend an inch.

Deep in the secret chambers of my heart

I muse my life-long hate, and without flinch

I bear it nobly as I live my part.

My being would be skeleton, a shell,

If this dark Passion that fills my every mood,

For critic-spies trained in modern literature departments, "America" is an invitation to old or new formalisms. Lushly allusive, semantically knotty, imagistically dense, hooked on conceptual tension, the sonnet's refusal to liquidate iambic pentameter and other high modernist enemies nonetheless begs for high modernist interpretive protocols. The first seven lines, an unbalanced, nonconforming unit of quatrain and virtual tercet, reach from the Harlem Renaissance to the English Renaissance to revive the sonnet motif of the cruel-fair mistress.

When Harlem Shadows was published in 1922, it was received as "a clean break with the dialect tradition of Dunbar. Of course, Dunbar himself had tried to make a break from dialect poetry but without success, and though McKay seemed to succeed by continuing to write in standard English, it can hardly be said that the break was a clean one. Indeed, the, gap between his standard English Poetry and the dialect was full of all sorts of entanglements, from which McKay was never to be free.

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”.]