To the White Fiends

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

To The White Fiends is a Petrarchan sonnet by Claude McKay.[1][2] The Poetry Foundation describes it as one of McKay's most famous works from the late 1910s.[3] 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".[4] Léon Damas quoted part of the poem in his 1937 book of poetry Pigments.[5][6][7] McKay, an immigrant to the United States, had written the poem the first year he spent in the nation in 1912.[8] He sent an early draft of the poem to William Stanley Braithwaite, a Bostonian poetry editor in January 1916.[9] 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.[4]

References

  1. ^ McKay, Claude. "To the White Fiends". Poets.org. Archived from the original on 2022-06-27. Retrieved 2022-06-27.
  2. ^ Black World/Negro Digest. Johnson Publishing Company. September 1975. pp. 37–39, 45.
  3. ^ "Claude McKay". Poetry Foundation. 2021-11-12. Retrieved 2021-11-12.
  4. ^ .
  5. .
  6. .
  7. .
  8. .
  9. .

External links