The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar

The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar gathers the published poetry of the African American poet who lived from 1872 to 1906 and who was the first major African American poet to achieve a wide American readership. Dunbar’s poetry combined formal English verse with what he called the dialect mode that drew on African American vernacular speech patterns, and his work was widely read in both white and Black American audiences across the 1890s and into the early 1900s before his early death from tuberculosis at thirty-three.

Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, to formerly enslaved parents who had come north after the Civil War. His mother Matilda Dunbar had been enslaved in Kentucky and his father Joshua Dunbar had escaped from slavery and served in the Union Army. Dunbar grew up in the small but cohesive African American community in Dayton and attended the city’s public schools, becoming the only African American student in his high school class. He worked as an elevator operator after graduation while writing the poetry that began to find magazine publication in the early 1890s.

His first book Oak and Ivy appeared in 1893, followed by Majors and Minors in 1895 and Lyrics of Lowly Life in 1896. William Dean Howells reviewed Lyrics of Lowly Life enthusiastically in Harper’s Weekly and his support helped establish Dunbar’s national reputation. The various subsequent collections including Lyrics of the Hearthside in 1899, Lyrics of Love and Laughter in 1903, and Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow in 1905 extended the body of work.

The dialect poetry that made Dunbar famous in his own time has been controversial in modern African American literary criticism. The dialect form drew on the minstrel show tradition that had been the dominant white American mode for representing African American speech, and some later critics have argued that Dunbar’s dialect work compromised with racist literary conventions even where the poems themselves were sympathetic to African American characters. The formal English poems, including Sympathy with its famous I know why the caged bird sings, have generally been more easily admired.

The Complete Poems runs to several hundred pages. For readers of African American literature or of late-nineteenth-century American poetry generally, Dunbar is essential.