II. Title.
PS1556.A4 2004
811’.4—dc22 2003061981

 

 

 

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Introduction

Paul Laurence Dunbar had the paradoxical fortune to be born amid the influences of two movements that had enormous impact on what he wrote and how he wrote it: Romanticism, stemming from the European poetic tradition, and the rise of the minstrel, part of the American musical tradition.

The distinguished African American critic Charles T. Davis informs us in an essay entitled “Paul Laurence Dunbar” (in Black Is the Color of the Cosmos: Essays on Afro-American Literature and Culture, 1942—1981) that the Romantic tradition that held sway in the United States from 1870 to 1890 (121) is represented everywhere in Dunbar’s work. Also of great influence is the minstrel tradition, which reached “its highest level in the decades between 1850 and 1870,” according to Carl Wittke in his comprehensive study Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage (64).

While the minstrel influences, found principally in Dunbar’s dialect poems, may reflect a stereotypical view of blacks and slavery, his standard English poems depict a more Romantic view of the world. Reassessing those influences may shed refreshing light on why numerous critics felt it necessary to accuse Dunbar of being an accommodationist. The harsh reality that pervaded the end of the nineteenth century, with its attendant skepticism, may in some ways be attributed to the decline of the Romantic tradition. But more to the point, Dunbar seems to move back and forth between these two traditions while investing them with his own imagination and perception.

When William Dean Howells wrote his famous review of Dunbar’s poetry in Harper’s in 1895, he was for all intents and purposes introducing Dunbar to the American reading public. Howells’s statement contributed greatly to Dunbar’s already growing reputation, and especially to the popularity of his dialect poems. Furthermore, he at once removed second-class citizenship from Dunbar and lifted the veil of obscurity that hung over African American talent. These are his words:

. . . the contents of this book are wholly of his own choosing, and I do not know how much or little he may have preferred the poems in literary English. Some of these I thought very good, and even more than very good, but not distinctively his contribution to the body of American poetry. What I mean is that several people might have written them; but I do not know any one else at present who could quite have written the dialect pieces. These are divinations and reports of what passes in the hearts and minds of a lowly people whose poetry had hitherto been inartic ulately expressed in music, but now finds, for the first time in our tongue, literary interpretation of a very artistic completeness.

Having calmed down from his newfound notoriety, Dunbar acknowledged Howells’s generosity in a letter dated July 13, 1896:

Now from the depths of my heart I want to thank you. You yourself do not know what you have done for me. I feel much as a poor, insignificant, helpless boy would feel to suddenly find himself knighted. I can tell you nothing about myself because there is nothing to tell. My whole life has been simple, obscure and uneventful. I have written my little pieces and sometimes recited them, but it seemed hardly by my volition. The kindly praise you have accorded me will be an incentive to more careful work. My greatest fear is that you may have been more kind to me than just.

However, while Howells’s endorsement contributed greatly to Dunbar’s fame and reputation, it also, inadvertently, created expectations about a stereotype of dialect. Often overlooked in Howells’s praise is that he judged Dunbar’s standard English poems “good and in some cases very very good.” Unfortunately, this endorsement went unnoticed by most of the editors who read the review. Instead they concentrated on Howells’s assertion about the energy, power, and force in the tone and character of the dialect poems and generally ignored the high caliber of the standard English poems.

Concerning this question about dialect, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has suggested in his book The Signifying Monkey that for

. . .