Claude McKay Publishes Songs of Jamaica
Poet involved
What happened
In 1912, Claude McKay published Songs of Jamaica, a poetry collection using Jamaican Creole and local rural subjects. At a time when standard English dominated literary respectability, McKay treated peasant speech and colonial experience as poetic material. The book appeared before his central role in the Harlem Renaissance.
Literary impact
McKay's early dialect poems helped legitimise Caribbean vernacular as literature. His later sonnets of race, anger, migration, and resistance carried this linguistic confidence into Black international modernism and influenced poets of the African diaspora.
Source: Wikipedia
