Claude McKay and Chris Tonelli

Claude McKay and Chris Tonelli do not have much in common in their poetry. McKay is a Harlem Renaissance era socialist whose polemic poetry is charged with an anger over racial injustice, and Tonelli is a young living poet who focuses a lot on nature, observation, and the self. I did find one interesting similarity between two of their poems, however.
In one of his sonnets, "The Negroe's Tragedy," McKay takes the classic form of sonnet and uses it to express anger over the systematic racism that was rampant in his day (and still is today). In one of his poems in The Trees Around, "Prologue to a Song of Marriage," which is about a Greek myth, the last lines say, "I assume, muse, that you're/ the heavenly one here./ How could I turn back to you/ in light of such historic suffering?" I think the question is phrased toward the epic as a genre by addressing the muse, although Tonelli would obviously not be abandoning poetry itself. The similarity I see is that both poems are changing a tradition without abandoning it completely. "The Negroe's Tragedy" is a sonnet with a modern and polemic twist, and "Prologue..." is a poem about rejecting a muse.
Again, most of McKay and Tonelli is on different playing fields, but this similarity is important in light of modern American poetry itself. Just as Ezra Pound credited Walt Whitman with breaking the new word and announced that is was time to carve the wood, modern American poetry has been a break from tradition without completely abandoning it. Being hyperaware of tradition, while still breaking from its confines and reshaping it, seems to be the story of 20th century poetry.