Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/148

126 Ask me why I love you, dear, Let the lark reply, Why his heart is full of song When the twilight's night; Why the lover heaves a sigh When her heart is true; If you will but answer me, I will answer you.

IX. Claude McKay

An English subject, being born and growing to manhood in Jamaica, Claude McKay, a pure blood Negro, was first discovered as a poet by English critics. In Jamaica, as early as 1911, when he was but twenty-two years of age, his Constab Ballads, in Negro dialect, was published. Even in so broken a tongue this book revealed a poet—on the constabulary force of Jamaica. In 1920 his first book of poems in literary English, Spring in New Hampshire, came out in England, with a Preface by Mr. I. A. Richards, of Cambridge, England.