Thematic Trends in Claude Mckay’s Selected Poems of the Harlem Era

Abstract

Black American Literature is a microcosm of the history of the black people’s presence on the American continent as it is known today.  The literature of the Black Americans cannot be fully separated from the experience of Slavery and Racism which characterized their lives as a community of people whose social, economic and political privileges are tied up with the evils of race and color.  In the latter part of the eighteen century, most black slaves started developing interest in written literature but before this time, they were more interested in the struggle for survival than to spare the time for literary art.  This paper reveals the traumatic experiences of the Blacks in the plantations in the hands of their White masters in America through some of the poems of Claude McKay bringing out some themes in such poems to reveal the traumatized life of the Africans.