Poet Paul Laurence Dunbar
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Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in 1873 and died in 1906. Dunbar was the first major African American Poet in American literature and also the first African American poet to garner national critical acclaim. He was born in Dayton, Ohio to two freed slaves. Joshua, his father, had escaped from slavery and fled to Canada through the Underground Railroad, but he returned to fight in the Civil War. Joshua was one of the relatively few slaves who had been taught to read because his skill as a plasterer earned his owner extra income, and the owner had Joshua taught to read and do sums so he would not be cheated of wages in his outside work. He followed news of the impending war in newspapers in Canada and returned to fight in the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Infantry, the second black regiment to be organized by the Union Army. He settled in Dayton after the war and married Matilda J. Burton Murphy, a widow who was already the mother of two; Paul would be their only child together. Matilda had been a house slave in Kentucky who was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. She had had no formal schooling of her own, but she could read and taught her son to read (Rauch 87). Dunbar attended school at Central High in Dayton and wrote poems for special occasions. He also edited the school paper and was elected a member and ultimately president of the exclusive Philomathean Society. Orville Wright was a school friend who later printed The Tattler, a newspaper Dunbar edited and pub
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ws that he was well aware of the rebelliousness underlying his use and his character's use of black dialect.
Dunbar as poet had dual identities. On the one hand, eh was a Victorian poet writing in a relatively formal style of literary English, and it would be considered "Victorian" because the language he used was essentially European in origin. The sources for this style included Longfellow, Tennyson, Keats, Byron, and popular but minor poets Mrs. Felicia Hemans and Adelaide Anne Procter. Dunbar also wrote as a dialect poet, and these works are generally lighter, more humorous, and more sentimental. His poetic source was the Hoosier dialect poems of Indiana by James Whitcomb Riley, who also wrote in both poetic manners and who carefully demarcated the two identities in his work. Riley felt that his dialect work was inferior, nonserious, and nonliterary, and Dunbar would eventually decide the same about his own dialect work:
Both Riley and Dunbar preferred to cultivate the literary muse, but both found that the public--and the editors who catered to them--favored the work in dialect. As so often, the public was right; the dialect work had in their lifetime and has to this day more vigor and life. . . (Revell 55).
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Approximate Word count = 1699
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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