“All my life I have been a troubadour wanderer, nourishing myself mainly on the poetry of existence.”

Casting the poet as itinerant singer fed by lived experience · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Life
• Poetry
• Travel

“For I am so intensely subjective as a poet that I was not aware, at the moment of writing, that I was transformed into a medium of mass sentiment.”

On discovering that a personal sonnet had become a public anthem · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Expression
• Poetry
• Poets

“It was the first time I had ever come face to face with such manifest, implacable hate of my race, and my feelings were indescribable.”

Recording the shock of American racial hatred after Jamaica · Essay, Claude McKay Describes His Own Life, Pearson's Magazine, 1918

• America
• Anger
• Race