American Literature Commons^™

Uniting Octave And Sestet: Completing 'The Cycle' Of Mckay's Sequence, Cocoa Williams

All Theses

This thesis examines Claude McKay's The Cycle (c. 1943) in relationship to how McKay's other sonnets have been received by scholars and the ways in which this collection speaks to fallacies concerning didactic art, African American views on the British literary tradition, and the literary merit of McKay's later poetry post Catholic conversion. Much of the criticism on McKay's other sonnets deals primary with the question of whether the sonnet form is an appropriate vehicle for such mutinous and didactic commentary. Critics tend to answer this question in one of two ways. Some assert that because the relationship between form …