INTERPRETING 4H
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ny Human to Another;The Tropics in New York The Harlem Renaissance. During the late 1800's and early 1900's,many southern blacks moved north, hoping to find opportunities inthe northern industrial centers. With this shift in population, the NewYork City community of Harlem developed into the cultural center forAmerican blacks. There a cultural movement known as the HarlemRenaissance was established during the 1920's. The movement en-compassed music, art, and literature, and included such writers asCountee Cullen, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer,and Arna Bontemps. Although the literary forms and techniques used by the HarlemRenaissance writers varied widely, the writers all shared a commonpurpose: to prove that black writers could produce literature equal inquality to that of white writers. At the same time, the Harlem Renais-sance writers focused on capturing the general sentiments of theAmerican blacks of the time. In doing so they expressed their displeas-ure concerning their overall condition and articulated their culturalheritage. In “The Tropics in New York, ” Claude McKay presents a series ofimages, or word pictures, associated with the tropics. Prepare a listof the type of images you would expect to find in this series. One of the issues that the writers of the Harlem Renaissance debatedamong themselves and explored in their poetry was the relationshipbetween race and poetry. Some viewed their poetry as primarily a ve-hicle for expressing what it means to be black in America; others re-garded their works as dealing with more traditional poetic subjects:love, nature, childhood, home. These subjects were not consideredto be exclusive of one another. But many black writers discovered atension between writing poetry that dealt explicitly with black experi-ences and poetry that dealt more with universal experiences.Countee Cullen, whose works have been compared with tradi-tional British and American poetry, sometimes expressed a view thatblack writers should write within the broader literary tradition andtranscend their own racial background. But at other times, he admit-ted how difficult this was to do. “Somehow or other | find my poetry ofitself treating of the Negro, of his joys and his sorrows—mostly of thelatter—and of the heights and depths of emotion which | feel as aNegro.”Which view do his poems express? ae Cuide for Internvetine: Sern
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