During the bombing of London during the second world war, Winston Churchill read his nation a sonnet, written in the Queen's English, titled "If We Must Die." The sonnet urged the people of Britain to stand strong against Germany, and to courageously fight back.
"If We Must Die" was not written about the bombing of London. It was written by Claude McKay, a socialist Jamaican writer who had left Jamaica for the United States and was living in New York when he wrote the poem about a series of race riots, urging blacks to fight back against their white oppressors.
When McKay had started out, his first two books -- one published in Jamaica and the other in England -- were poems written in Jamaican dialect. It seemed almost as if McKay were capitalizing on the exotic nature of how lower-class Jamaicans spoke. Even so, many of these poems followed the established European form of the ballad. After moving away from Jamaica and studying agriculture at Kansas State University, McKay became interested in W.E.B. DuBois, and to do his part of becoming part of the talented tenth, McKay took to mastering the traditional forms of European poetry. McKay became a master of the sonnet, and wrote in the form so skillfully that he fooled Churchill who read him over the airwaves as though he were an old master who had custom written the poem as a nationalistic cry of solidarity.
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