the vast forgotten African Empires of Ifé and Benin, although so wistful in their tranquillity, are tranquil in the possession of the qualities of all classic and great art, so these poems, the purest of them, move with a sovereignty that is never new to the lovers of the high music of human utterance.
It is the peculiarity of his experience, rather than of his nature, that makes this poet’s race a fact to be remembered in the enjoyment of his songs. The subject of all poetry is the experience of the poet, and no man of any other race in the world can touch or imagine the experience of the children of African slaves in America.
Claude McKay was born in 1890 in a little thatched house of two rooms in a beautiful valley of the hilly middle-country of Jamaica. He was born to the genial, warm, patient, neighborly farmer’s life of that island. It was a life rich in sun and sound and color and emotion, as we can see in his poems which are forever homeward yearning—in the midst of their present passion and strong will into the future, forever vividly remembering. Like a blue-bird’s note in a March wind, those sudden clear thoughts of
