agriculture at BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’s Tuske-
gee Institute, and by Spring in New Hampshire
and Other Poems (1920), which was published in
London, Harlem Shadows is, for the most part, a
collection of many of the poems McKay had pub-
lished in such journals and newspapers as Libera-
tor, Negro World, Seven Arts, Pearson’s Magazine,
Cambridge Magazine, and Worker’s Dreadnought
and had included in Spring in New Hampshire.
Among the 70 poems in Harlem Shadows,
McKay included his signature poem, “If We Must
Die,” which had been published in Liberator in
1919 but was not included in Spring in New Hamp-
shire. “If We Must Die” is among McKay’s more
militant poems in the collection. In this now-clas-
sic sonnet, McKay’s speaker adamantly and mili-
tantly announces his determination to actively and
fearlessly assume total existential responsibility for
his life. He demands that racism must be met head
on: “And for their thousand blows, deal one death-
blow! / What though before us lies the open grave.”
The intrepid speaker exhorts in the ending cou-
plet, “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly
pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back”
(McKay, 43).
McKay begins Harlem Shadows with “Amer-
ica,” another equally militant sonnet in which his
speaker not only acknowledges his love/hate rela-
tionship with America but also prophesies Amer-
ica’s inevitable doom under the weight of racism
and modernity:
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders
there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
(Selected Poems, 30)However, McKay also included such poems as
the title poem, “Flame Heart,” “The Tropics in New
York,” and “When Dawn Comes to the City,” which
explore the major themes that came to dominate
his oeuvre throughout his career as a poet and
which feature more sensitive, gentle, idealistic
and romantic speakers. Whereas “Flame Heart”
(“So much have I forgotten in ten short years”)
and “Tropics” (“A wave of longing through my
body swept”) romantically recall lost childhood
and innocence in a more Edenic setting, “Harlem
Shadows” (“I see the shapes of girls who pass / To
bend and barter at desire’s call”) and “When Dawn
Comes” (“Out of the tenements, cold as stone, /
Dark figures start for work”) decry the conse-
quences of modernity, a world in which, McKay’s
speakers maintain, humanity is inevitably com-
modified and marginalized.
Reviewing Harlem Shadows in major venues
like The New York Times, New Republic, and Mar-
cus Garvey’s Negro World, black and white crit-
ics identified McKay as the best black poet since
PAU L LAURENCE DUNBAR. WALTER WHITE wrote that
McKay “is not a great Negro poet—he is a great
poet” (quoted in Cooper, 164–165). Celebrating
McKay’s accomplishments as a new poetic voice,
Robert Littel, the reviewer for New Republic, wrote
that McKay strikes “hard and pierce[s] deep. It is
not merely poetic emotion [he] express [es], but
something fierce and constant, and icy cold, and
white hot” (quoted in Cooper, 164).BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner
in the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Schocken
Books, 1987.
McKay, Claude. Selected Poems. Edited by Joan R.
Sherman. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications,
1999.
Wilfred D. SamuelsHarper, Frances Ellen Watkins
(1825–1911)
Novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, jour-
nalist, orator, and activist Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper was one of the most dynamic orators and
best-known poets of the 19th century and gained
public attention in the time between poets PHILLIS
WHEATLEY and PAU L LAURENCE DUNBAR. She was
also a pioneer of the short story and the author
of Iola Leroy: Or, Shadows Uplifted (1892), the
best-selling novel written by an African-Ameri-
can before the 20th century. Born the only child232 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins