The Last Word: Claude McKay's Unpublished "Cycle Manuscript"

Abstract

During the summer of 1943, five years before his death and one year before his baptism into the Roman Catholic Church, Claude McKay began his Cycle Manuscript, a collection of fifty-four new and poems, mostly sonnets (Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance 358-59). He would never see it published. Too bitter and personal, claimed the editor at Harper's, and Dutton's said his sonnets were not poems at all (qtd. in Cooper, The Passion of Claude McKay 307). In a letter Max Eastman, editor of the socialist journal The Liberator and McKay's close friend, a frustrated McKay lamented a loss of his old style, as he appealed Eastman to look through the poems and make any needed corrections (qtd. in The Passion 307). Once the fiery poet who could deftly balance lyricism and polemics, McKay now felt more like Pope and Swift... than like Shelley and Keats and the Elizabethans. Betraying a waning confidence, he welcomed Eastman's judgment: And the poems! They are wonderful look at after you chop them up! (qtd. in The Passion 309). Despite Eastman's emendations, McKay's collection was never published. The work remains a typescript at the Beinecke Rare Book and Library at Yale University. But beyond any question of its literary merit, the Cycle Manuscript is an important document that sheds light on the reflections of a sensitive, gifted artist at a dramatic stage in his life.