Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Project Gutenberg

This 1922 poetry collection is wide-ranging and beautifully composed. As the title hints, this is a product of that great literary and artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.

The seventy-plus poems include sonnets and various other forms of poems, mostly lyric and rarely more than a couple pages in length. Besides being varied in form, they poems are also diverse of tone — from frank invectives on race to sweet love poems. They take New York as their home and tap into the verve of the day. The collection includes many of McKay’s best-known poems including: “If We Must Die,” “America,” and “Harlem Shadows.” Though bucolic beauties such as “Spring in New Hampshire” and “The Snow-Fairy” are not to be skipped over.

I enjoyed these poems and found them powerful and lyrical.

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