Dunbar to draw upon dialect as a medium through which to posit this mode of realism suggests both a certain boldness as well as a certain opportunism, two qualities that helped to inform Dunbar’s mixed results, which we know so well, he lamented to his death.

Dunbar chose this avenue of “boldness” in order to gain, maintain, and secure his place in the American literary canon. There should be little doubt that Dunbar had an ear for perfect pitch. The rhythms and speech of his poems as well as the acquisition and approximation of that language testify to the “boldness” that he so readily took in hand and shaped into art.

For over one hundred years, readers have found an enormous amount of creativity invested in the dialect poems. There is truth in the critic’s observation concerning the authenticity of voice in Dunbar’s poems. A special humanity emanates from them, and when we admit this point, we must also admit that no one, including Dunbar, believed for an instant that African Americans were the perpetual happy dancers and singers of the stereotype while they suffered the yoke of slavery.

Howells, in his introduction to Lyrics of Lowly Life, observes:

. . . Paul Dunbar was the only man of pure African blood and of American civilization to feel the negro life aesthetically and express it lyrically. . . . I thought his merits positive and not comparative; and I held that if his black poems had been written by a white man, I should not have found them less admirable. I accepted them as an evidence of the essential unity of the human race . . .

Howells is quick to take note of Dunbar’s slave parentage. When it came to Pushkin, the Russians claimed it was his Russian genes that made him the great poet he became, and not his African ancestry; the same claim was advanced by the French when it came to Dumas. In the case of Dunbar, no such claim would be made. Dunbar had achieved for Africans and African Americans.

Because Dunbar longed for public attention for his work, the choice of entrance was clearly marked for him. The two doors read: Minstrel and Dialect. Dunbar gave in to the prevailing style and chose Dialect when it came to the poems and Minstrel when it came to the musicals and one-act plays. From another viewpoint it may be reasonable to understand why Dunbar and his future composer-collaborator Will Marion Cook arrived at the position they found themselves in if we consider a statement by Gary D. Engle in his book This Grotesque Essence: Plays from the American Minstrel Stage (xiii): “For better or worse, the characteristic art of a democracy is shaped by the will of the audience, not of the artist. Popularity becomes one measure of artistic value.” Further, Engle sees the stereotypical, historical black as “that grotesque concoction of song, dance, wooly-wigged image of banjo-plunking, blackface minstrel clown” (xiv). In this regard Engle remarks that “The figure of the minstrel clown has been the most influential image of blacks in American history” (xiv). One might see, then, that this form and its use of dialect were inescapable.

Consider dialect as a tradition, and we have to entertain the four best practitioners of the art: Mark Twain in the South, James Whitcomb Riley and Paul Laurence Dunbar in the Midwest, and Bret Harte in the West. Perhaps most remembered and celebrated for southern white and black dialects, as well as standard English and “pretend” British English, are the Duke and King and other characters in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—often considered, ironically, the great American novel. No such honor is accorded Dunbar, but his use of dialect was not only on par with that of Twain but also equally memorable. Without his risk taking, American readers would miss the serious irony Dunbar employs in many of his dialect poems, and in many of his short lyrics as well. Whether or not we, in this century, endorse his choices, the irony remains that had he chosen differently, he would have had to struggle on in regional obscurity. His successes are due considerably to his willingness to make the “bold” choices and take the chances he did.