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Claude McKay(1890-1948) has often been thought of as an immediate forerunner and one of the key members of the Harlem Renaissance, so it is impossible to assess the Harlem Renaissance without considering his contribution and influence. Yet it is necessary not to put too much emphasis on the position and role of McKay as a Renaissance writer because such an approach is likely to overlook the complexity and multiplicity of his life and literary world. More than anything else, his life was “a single episode in the 500-year-old drama of black diaspora.” In that context, McKay was “a colonial writer who happened to stop over in Harlem on his lifelong quest for a spiritual home.” Unexpectedly, his staying in America was a turning point in his life and literary career. He came to understand the cruelty and bitterness of American racism in person and represented the alienation and racial discrimination that the marginal minority group of black immigrants faced in America in his poems collected in Harlem Shadows. Therefore, I think it very important to reevaluate McKay as a black diaspora poet. So, if judging him based on poems collected in Harlem Shadows, it is not far-overstretched to say that McKay was one of the writers “whose intellectual pedigree was often entirely metropolitan but whose work could be characterized as providing an alternative consciousness to that of mainstream, orthodox, or establishment consciousness prevailing in Europe and the United States.”