Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920) is a poetry
collection by Claude McKay. Published toward the beginning of the
Harlem Renaissance, Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems is the
first of McKay's collections to appear in the United States. As a
committed leftist, McKay-who grew up in Jamaica-captures the life
of African Americans from a realist's point of view, lamenting
their exposure to poverty, racism, and violence while celebrating
their resilience and cultural achievement. Several years before T.
S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) and William Carlos Williams'
Spring and All (1923), modernist poet Claude McKay troubles the
traditional symbol of springtime to accommodate the hardships of an
increasingly industrialized world. In "Spring in New Hampshire,"
the poet gives voice to a desperate laborer, for whom the beauty
and harmony of the season of rebirth are not only sickening, but
altogether inaccessible: "Too green the springing April grass, /
Too blue the silver-speckled sky, / For me to linger here, alas, /
While happy winds go laughing by, / Wasting the golden hours
indoors, / Washing windows and scrubbing floors." A master of
traditional forms, McKay brings his experience as a black man to
bear on a poem otherwise dedicated to descriptions of natural
beauty, challenging the very tradition his language and style
invoke. In "The Lynching," he calls on the reader to witness the
brutality of American racism while exposing the complicity of those
who would look without feeling: "[S]oon the mixed crowds came to
view / The ghastly body swaying in the sun: / The women thronged to
look, but never a one / Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely
blue..." As children dance around the victim's body, "lynchers that
were to be," McKay raises a terrible, timeless question: how long
will such violence endure? With a beautifully designed cover and
professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Claude McKay's
Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems is a classic of Jamaican
literature reimagined for modern readers.
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