At first it may seem incongruous: a Black poet’s scathing indictment of racism in contemporary America set in a Shakespearean sonnet, a poetic form more than four centuries old. But “The White House” is in fact a very carefully sculpted Shakespearean sonnet: 14 lines, three quatrains and a concluding couplet, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. It might seem that the incandescent rage of Black America, voiced through the speaker, would dispense with any conformity to such an inherited (and very white) form. Indeed, if poetry is language set to music, the musical forms of the Harlem Renaissance, the explosion for instance in the uninhibited spontaneities of new jazz, would suggest the time had come for Black poets to set form itself free.

Yet that incongruity is at the very heart of McKay’s dilemma. After all, in this poem the speaker is not entirely sure what to do with his anger. Hence the sonnet is a perfect vehicle for reflecting that thematic argument. At the thematic heart of the Shakespearean sonnet is always a dramatic sense of conflict, a playing out of a complicated dynamic—the poet uses the sonnet form to explore difficult, emotional tensions: love versus unrequited love; love versus carnal lust; beauty versus time’s passage; love versus selfishness; the heart versus the head.