To The White Fiends is a Petrarchan sonnet by Claude McKay. The Poetry Foundation describes it as one of McKay's most famous works from the late 1910s. 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". Léon Damas quoted part of the poem in his 1937 book of poetry Pigments. McKay, an immigrant to the United States, had written the poem the first year he spent in the nation in 1912. He sent an early draft of the poem to William Stanley Braithwaite, a Bostonian poetry editor in January 1916. 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.
References
- McKay, Claude. "To the White Fiends". Poets.org. Archived from the original on 2022-06-27. Retrieved 2022-06-27.
- Black World/Negro Digest. Johnson Publishing Company. September 1975. pp. 37–39, 45.
- "Claude McKay". Poetry Foundation. 2021-11-12. Retrieved 2021-11-12.
- ^ 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.
- Wintz, Cary D. (1996). Analysis and Assessment, 1980-1994. Taylor & Francis. p. 205. ISBN 978-0-8153-2218-4.
- Miller, F. Bart (2014-04-10). Rethinking Négritude through Léon-Gontran Damas. Rodopi. pp. 61–65. ISBN 978-94-012-1071-3.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
 | This article related to a poem from the 1910s is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it. |