America (Claude McKay poem) Essay Questions

How and why does McKay subvert aspects of the traditional sonnet structure in "America"?

While McKay's sonnet is ostensibly a Shakespearean sonnet with an ABABCDCDEFEFGG rhyme scheme, the poem's syntactical and semantic elements are actually often in tension with this structure. Paralleling the sense of duality within the poem, McKay gives his sonnet a mirror structure of 2 seven-line sections that reflect each other in a 4+3, 3+4 pattern. This construction, where sense and meaning are often at odds with structural form, shows McKay rebelling within the "walls" of "America" just as his speaker rebels from with the walls of America, and these tensions and ambiguities ultimately allow McKay to realize the potential of the sonnet form in new and powerful ways.

How does the poem call attention to America's failures and hypocrisy?

Throughout the poem, McKay suggests that despite its self-conception as a country founded on freedom and equal rights, America is actually a violent and oppressive nation. The early comparison to a tiger, in the words of critics Kotti Sree Ramesh and Kandula Nirupa Rani, "hits hard on the dominant culture's inherent ideological contradictions in tropical animal imagery," and the vampiric image of stealing the speaker's life force suggests that America actually exploits—even kills—those "she" is supposed to provide for. Moreover, the comparison to a "king in state" highlights the autocratic and reactionary aspects of America, preparing us for the later reference to "Ozymandias, King of Kings" and implying that America is more like an empire than a multi-ethnic democracy.