This week we’re once again dipping into the 20th Century and sampling a little sonnet-sized taster of the Harlem Renaissance. Claude McKay, a Jamaican poet who was also the first to publish poetry in the Jamaican dialect, was a key figure in the early days of the movement. He was also greatly fond of the Romantic poets and the old forms and in the sonnet America he uses subtle echoes of Shelley’s Ozymandias to look into the contradictions of his place within the great nation.