Claude McKay Research Paper

Claude McKay is a Jamaican born poet. In his poems that he wrote, he shows a lot of patriotism towards his native country. He is also very proud to be African American. In my research paper about him, I am going to talk about his patriotism that he had towards Jamaica. I don't know exactly how my thesis is going to be worded, but it is going to be something about his patriotism towards his country. McKay also had a lot of influences that contributed to his patriotism that he had. Since he was little, McKay's parents had influenced him and continuously told his to have pride to be African American and be proud of his heritage. His father also used to tell him about African folk tales. So i guess that through his childhood experiences, it impacted McKay on his writing in the future. He saw that the environment that he lived in could be treated by his poetry in the language of the blacks. When he was in Jamaica and started writing his poetry, he wrote in Jamaican dialect. But when he moved to the US, he stopped using this dialect.
In my paper, or for the outline, i am not exactly sure how to divide up the categories. The paper is going to be something about his patriotism and how he was influenced towards his poetry that he wrote. McKay also uses a lot of imagery throughout his poems. And a lot of the imagery has images of like back in Jamaica, like in the poem "The Tropics of New York."

Emily DIckinson

Emily Dickinson has one very unique style of writing poetry. Her poems are all full of random Capitalization, punctuation, and none of the poems have titles. I think that it has to do with the fact that during her last 10 years of life, she decided to stay away from society. She refused to leave her home and wouldn't meet any strangers. So maybe this relates to her unique style of writing poetry. With her capitalizations, she puts emphasis on those specific words. For example, in her poem, "Becuase I could not stop for Death," in the line "We passed the School, where Children strove," she capitalizes School and CHildren to put emphasis on those two. "We' being the first word of the poem, is expected to be capitalized. This shows how Dickinson places great emphasis on individual words. Some other patterns that are seen throughout Emily Dickinson's works include iambic tetrameter, freedom, bird imagery (especially robins), and religion. She also puts a lot of questions in her poems. She wasn't interested in answes in her poems, but she wanted to explore questions.

2 Poems by Claude McKay

Two of the poems that i read my CLaude McKay were "A memory of June" and "A Red Flower."
In "A Memory of June" there is a lot of words that represent rebirth in it. They include: baptize, fresh, white, mating, death , wed, and showers. All of these words appear throughout the poem and they are a symbol of rebirth. I guess that there are a lot of these words becuase the title is 'a memory of june' so it is going into a new month, hence a rebirth. This poem also had end rhyme in it. It was in a pattern of A B A B C D C D... etc.
In "A Red Flower", I noticed the use of colors. There were red, blue, brown and green. The red reprents the flowers; blue the sky and water; brown the earth; and green the grass. Hence, McKay has used the colors that represent the earth. THere were also a lot of words in the poem that represent nature. Some of these words were: lily, butterflies, rain, bees, trees, bee, sea and flower. This poem, like the other one also had end rhyme in the same pattern.