The Sonnet after the War: T. S. Eliot, Rupert Brooke, Claude McKay

1This chapter looks at T. S. Eliot in the light of a contrastive study with Claude McKay. In the last couple of decades, McKay has undergone a spectacular revival and become a central focus of modernist studies. The publication of his Complete Poems in 2004, and of long-missing novels like Amiable with Big Teeth in 2017 and Romance in Marseille in 2020, has fueled research into his posthumously expanding corpus. As modernist studies have veered away from a vision of the modern preempted by the (white) “Men of 1914,” he has been promoted as standard-bearer of an alternative African American and black diasporic modernism. I would like to build on such views to suggest that Harlem Shadows, McKay’s poetry collection and one of the founding texts of the Harlem Renaissance, can be read both with and against The Waste Land, as embodying an antagonist, almost symmetrical version of the modern – each text revealing the ideological or aesthetic terrain where the other does not venture.

2In