“I had wandered far and away until I had grown into a truant by nature and undomesticated in the blood.”

Confessing a temperament that could not settle into domestic life · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Freedom
• Self
• Travel

“Why should a Negro's love poetry be offensive to the white man, who prides himself on being modern and civilized?”

Challenging the double standard that polices Black feeling in art · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Love
• Poetry
• Race

“In joining the Roman Catholic church, I feel proud of belonging to that vast universal body of Christians, which is the greatest stabilizing force in the world today.”

Explaining conversion as a turn toward a worldwide communion · Essay, Why I Became a Catholic, Ebony, March 1946

• Belonging
• Faith
• Religion

“If and when I take the step I want to be intellectually honest and sincere about it.”

Insisting that conversion must satisfy mind as well as need · Letter to Max Eastman, June 1944

• Conviction
• Faith
• Honesty

“I do believe in the mystery of the symbol of the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, through which all of humanity may be united in brotherly love.”

Stating the faith that preceded his reception into the Catholic Church · Letter, 16 August 1944

• Faith
• Religion
• Unity

“In spite of my politics I don't like politicians, red, black, pink or white.”

Separating political conviction from liking for political operators · Letter to Langston Hughes, 24 April 1926

• Character
• Independence
• Politics

“I prefer a thousand times to belong to an oppressed race, sure and proud of what I am, than to be anything like you, a vile loathsome pathetic crawling filthy worm of the world of oppressors.”

Choosing oppressed identity over the manners of the oppressor · Letter, reply to a white correspondent

• Dignity
• Pride
• Race

“The spirituals and the blues were not created out of sweet deceit. Spirituals and blues contain sublimated bitterness and humility, pathos and bewilderment.”

Hearing folk song as distilled suffering rather than picturesque charm · Article, New York Herald Tribune, 6 March 1932

• Culture
• Music
• Suffering

“Feelings of bitterness are a natural part of the black man's birthright. To ask him to render up his bitterness is asking him to part with his soul.”

Refusing the demand that the injured smile away their history · Article, New York Herald Tribune, 6 March 1932

• Bitterness
• Race
• Soul

“I felt assurance that If We Must Die was just what I intended it to be, a universal poem.”

Taking later wartime use of the sonnet as proof of its wider intent · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Meaning
• Poetry
• War

“Even though many of my themes were racial, I wrote my poems to make a universal appeal.”

Insisting that protest themes need not cancel a general human address · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Poetry
• Race
• Readers

“I have always felt that my gift of song was something bigger than the narrow confining limits of any one people and its problems.”

Claiming a universal reach beyond any single racial brief · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Humanity
• Identity
• Poetry

“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

“I have nothing to give but my singing. And all I offer here is the distilled poetry of my experience.”

Reducing a life's gift to song drawn from experience · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Experience
• Poetry
• Vocation

“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

“The spirit of the vagabond, the daemon of some poets, had got hold of me.”

Naming restlessness as the poet's driving spirit · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Poets
• Restlessness
• Travel

“This great catastrophe has come upon the world proving the real hollowness of nationhood, patriotism, racial pride and most of the things which one was taught to respect and reverence.”

Wartime scepticism toward the idols of nation and race · Essay, Claude McKay Describes His Own Life, Pearson's Magazine, 1918

• Patriotism
• Scepticism
• War

“I had heard of prejudice in America but never dreamed of it being so intensely bitter.”

Contrasting Jamaican class prejudice with American racial virulence · Essay, Claude McKay Describes His Own Life, Pearson's Magazine, 1918

• America
• Disillusionment
• Race

“I felt and still feel that one must seek for the noblest and best in the individual life only: each soul must save itself.”

Turning from mass categories toward individual moral salvage · Essay, Claude McKay Describes His Own Life, Pearson's Magazine, 1918

• Individuality
• Morality
• Soul

“Then I soon found myself hating in return; but this feeling couldn't last long for to hate is to be miserable.”

Refusing to live inside the misery of reciprocal hatred · Essay, Claude McKay Describes His Own Life, Pearson's Magazine, 1918

• Hatred
• Misery
• Self

“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

“I have chosen my melodies and rhythms by instinct, and I have favored words and figures which flow smoothly and harmoniously into my compositions.”

Describing composition as an ear-led, instinctive craft · Author's Word, Harlem Shadows, 1922

• Craft
• Music
• Rhythm

“I have always, in the summing up, fallen back on my own ear and taste as the arbiter.”

Trusting inner judgement over critics and schools · Author's Word, Harlem Shadows, 1922

• Criticism
• Self
• Taste

“I have adhered to such of the older traditions as I find adequate for my most lawless and revolutionary passions and moods.”

Holding that inherited forms can carry radical feeling · Author's Word, Harlem Shadows, 1922

• Poetry
• Rebellion
• Tradition