Nevertheless, dialect proved to be the proverbial millstone around Dunbar’s neck. It succeeded in trapping him in a genre that he slowly grew to hate. He says in a letter to Dr. J. N. Matthews: “The Record of Monday July 31st had a little poem of mine. They won’t take anything but dialect so I have no market for anything else.”

Ultimately Dunbar came to believe that Howells had done him irreparable harm in endorsing the dialect poems above those written in standard English. However, given the times in which Dunbar wrote, had Howells said nothing about his book, Dunbar might never have gained national attention. Howells gave Dunbar the recognition at the very time he needed it.

Nonetheless, dialect poetry was complicated by manifold issues, not only in terms of language, but also in terms of theme. The more sophisticated reader must have been stymied when he or she arrived at “Accountability,” in which the narrator steals a chicken from the master’s yard. The humor of his act is couched in predestination. He tells the reader that he is not responsible for his acts, and observes quite naturally that:

. . . ef we’se bad we ain’t to blame. Ef we’se good, we needn’t show off, case you bet it ain’t ouah doin’ . . .

It is this characterization that landed Dunbar in trouble with the newly rising black middle class. They no doubt sought to prove themselves worthy of their new status by using what was considered proper English. Slaves, on the other hand, had acquired much of their English by ear. The laws of the times specifically forbade anyone to teach them how to read and write. How else was one to learn how to communicate, in this new foreign land, except by repeating the version of English they heard from the people they were closest to? So dialect was born. It is what contemporary society celebrates as vernacular. What Dunbar was able to accomplish with dazzling singularity was to hear the language as it was used and then approximate that language and set it down in an artistic form. In the final analysis, Howells was absolutely correct in his summation of Dunbar’s talent when he wrote: “. . . if he should do nothing more than he has done, I should feel that he had made the strongest claim for the negro in English literature that the negro has yet made.”

Furthermore, for all of the subjugation, ridicule, and mockery that dialect suggests, there is in Dunbar a consistent ironic tone even when the characters he presents seem to be mocking themselves and playing the fool with the wink of an eye. The rhythmic invention in “A Negro Love Song” anticipates rap. Nothing is slight about the repetitive “Jump back, honey, jump back.” Rhythmically this line sounds like a Bach ground for one of his inventions.