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.
