Early Uncollected Poetry (1911-1922)
McKay published a number of poems in Jamaican newspapers in 1911 and 1912, some of which made it into Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. A few that he excluded from those two Jamaican collections are noteworthy, especially "Christmas in De Air" and "Passive Resistance." While these poems are written in dialect, they are thematically quite similar to McKay's American and British poems written a decade later -- there are strong suggestions of moral outrage at the exploitation of working people in colonial Jamaica.
Several of the later poems included in this Path were published in Leftist magazines like Workers Dreadnought and The Liberator; some were published in Pearson's and The Messenger. Many of the poems published in Workers Dreadnought were published under the pseudonym "Hugh Hope." There is some overlap between the Harlem Shadows poems and the poems in this collection, though the differences in theme are sometimes striking.
Use the Visualization/Tags tool on the upper left to visualize relationships between the poems included in this collection and the poems McKay chose to include in Harlem Shadows.
Acknowledgments and Method
My thanks to Chris Forster for substantial help in tracking down original versions of some of these poems (especially The Messenger). My thanks also to the library at Temple University for allowing me to access and scan a limited number of pages from Workers Dreadnought on Microfilm. I also accessed the two Jamaican newspapers where McKay published a number of poems, The Daily Gleaner and Jamaica Times, at the Library of Congress in the summer of 2017.
All of these poems can also be found in William J. Maxwell's Complete Poems. However, the versions of the poems presented here are entirely derived from the original periodicals where they were published.