To the White Fiends

To The White Fiends is a Petrarchan sonnet by Claude McKay.^[1][2] The Poetry Foundation describes it as one of McKay's most famous works from the late 1910s.^[3] In 2018 the scholar Timo Muller described it as "a pivotal text in the history of the black protest sonnet" and notes that it was McKay's first to reach a "wider audience".^[4] Léon Damas quoted part of the poem in his 1937 book of poetry Pigments.^[5][6][7] McKay, an immigrant to the United States, had written the poem the first year he spent in the nation in 1912.^[8] He sent an early draft of the poem to William Stanley Braithwaite, a Bostonian poetry editor in January 1916.^[9] The Crisis rejected the poem and it was not published until 1918 by Pearson's Magazine. In 1919 the poem was republished by The Liberator magazine.^[4]

References

1. McKay, Claude. "To the White Fiends". Poets.org. from the original on 2022-06-27. Retrieved 2022-06-27.
2. Black World/Negro Digest. Johnson Publishing Company. September 1975. pp. 37–39, 45.
3. "Claude McKay". Poetry Foundation. 2021-11-12. Retrieved 2021-11-12.
4. Müller, Timo (2018-08-02). The African American Sonnet: A Literary History. Univ. Press of Mississippi. pp. 44–45. ISBN 978-1-4968-1786-0.
5. Wintz, Cary D. (1996). Analysis and Assessment, 1980-1994. Taylor & Francis. p. 205. ISBN 978-0-8153-2218-4.
6. Miller, F. Bart (2014-04-10). Rethinking Négritude through Léon-Gontran Damas. Rodopi. pp. 61–65. ISBN 978-94-012-1071-3.
7. Serrano, Richard (2006-11-24). Against the Postcolonial: "francophone" Writers at the Ends of French Empire. Lexington Books. p. 105. ISBN 978-0-7391-2029-3.
8. Cooper, Wayne (1964). "Claude McKay and the New Negro of the 1920's". Phylon. 25 (3): 297–306. doi:10.2307/273789. ISSN 0031-8906. JSTOR 273789.
9. Cooper, Wayne F. (1996-02-01). Claude McKay, Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography. LSU Press. pp. 78–79. ISBN 978-0-8071-2074-3.

External links

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