BLACK MEDIEVALISM: CLAUDE MCKAY'S LATE CATHOLIC POETRY

The poems Claude McKay wrote and published after his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1944 haven't received as much attention as his earlier work, but they are fascinating documents of his restless, radical mind. This relative neglect begins with his friend and editor Max Eastman, who left almost all of these poems out of his posthumous selection of McKay's poetry in 1953. Recently, though, as critics have challenged the secularist assumptions undergirding much twentieth-century literary criticism, the late phase of McKay's career has garnered increasing interest. Building on recent treatments of his Catholic period, I argue that McKay develops in his late poetry a "Black medievalism." Always committed to formal, traditional verse, especially the sonnet, McKay's shift to medievalist imagery is the biggest change in his postconversion poetics. Conversing in a shared medievalist idiom with other Catholics on the Left in the 1940s-principally in the Catholic Worker movement-McKay's late poetry imagines a version of sacred history that empowered his opposition to capitalist and racist oppression until his death in 1948.