DEDICATIONS
Lyrics Of Lowly Life
To
My Mother
________________________
Lyrics Of The Hearthside
To
Alice
________________________
Lyrics Of Love And Laughter
To
Miss Catherine Impey
________________________
Lyrics Of Sunshine And Shadow
To
Mrs. Frank Conover With Thanks For Her Long Belief
PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1872. His parents had both escaped from slavery in Kentucky, and his father was a veteran of the American Civil War. When Dunbar began to attend Dayton’s Central High School, he was the sole African-American student, but despite bullying and abuse became both the editor of the school newspaper and class president, as well as the president of the school literary society.
Dunbar’s first professionally published poems were ‘Our Martyred Soldiers’ and ‘On The River’, which appeared in Dayton’s The Herald newspaper in 1888. Two years later, Dunbar wrote and edited Dayton’s first weekly African-American newspaper, The Tattler. The publication lasted only six weeks, but provided Dunbar with valuable experience.
When his formal schooling ended in 1891, Dunbar took a job as an elevator operator. In 1893, he published his first collection of poetry, Oak and Ivy, subsidising the printing costs himself. The collection was popular, but Dunbar continued to struggle financially. It wasn’t until 1896, when William Dean Howells published a favourable review of Dunbar’s second book, Majors and Minors, that Dunbar’s writing gained national attention. With his new-found literary fame, Dunbar collected his first two books into one volume, Lyrics of Lowly Life, which included an introduction by Howells.
Dunbar was the first African-American poet to earn nation-wide distinction and acceptance. Although his frequent use of African-American dialects polarised opinion somewhat – some saw it as fostering stereotypes of blacks as comical or unintelligent, others as a reclaiming of linguistic identity – he quickly became an associate of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and Brand Whitlock. Dunbar’s writing even became so popular that he was honoured with a ceremonial sword by President Theodore Roosevelt.
Over the course of his career, Dunbar penned a dozen books of poetry, four books of short stories, five novels, and a play. He also wrote lyrics for In Dahomey - the first musical written and performed entirely by African-Americans to appear on Broadway in 1903. His essays and poems were published widely in the leading journals of the day. Dunbar died from tuberculosis in 1906, aged just thirty-three.
INTRODUCTION TO LYRICS OF LOWLY LIFE
I think I should scarcely trouble the reader with a special appeal in behalf of this book, if it had not specially appealed to me for reasons apart from the author’s race, origin, and condition. The world is too old now, and I find myself too much of its mood, to care for the work of a poet because he is black, because his father and mother were slaves, because he was, before and after he began to write poems, an elevator-boy. These facts would certainly attract me to him as a man, if I knew him to have a literary ambition, but when it came to his literary art, I must judge it irrespective of these facts, and enjoy or endure it for what it was in itself.
It seems to me that this was my experience with the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar when I found it in another form, and in justice to him I cannot wish that it should be otherwise with his readers here. Still, it will legitimately interest those who like to know the causes, or, if these may not be known, the sources, of things, to learn that the father and mother of the first poet of his race in our language were negroes without admixture of white blood. The father escaped from slavery in Kentucky to freedom in Canada, while there was still no hope of freedom otherwise; but the mother was freed by the events of the civil war, and came North to Ohio, where their son was born at Dayton, and grew up with such chances and mischances for mental training as everywhere befall the children of the poor. He has told me that his father picked up the trade of a plasterer, and when he had taught himself to read, loved chiefly to read history. The boy’s mother shared his passion for literature, with a special love of poetry, and after the father died she struggled on in more than the poverty she had shared with him. She could value the faculty which her son showed first in prose sketches and attempts at fiction, and she was proud of the praise and kindness they won him among the people of the town, where he has never been without the warmest and kindest friends.
In fact from every part of Ohio and from several cities of the adjoining States, there came letters in cordial appreciation of the critical recognition which it was my pleasure no less than my duty to offer Paul Dunbar’s work in another place. It seemed to me a happy omen for him that so many people who had known him, or known of him, were glad of a stranger’s good word; and it was gratifying to see that at home he was esteemed for the things he had done rather than because as the son of negro slaves he had done them. If a prophet is often without honor in his own country, it surely is nothing against him when he has it. In this case it deprived me of the glory of a discoverer; but that is sometimes a barren joy, and I am always willing to forego it.
What struck me in reading Mr. Dunbar’s poetry was what had already struck his friends in Ohio and Indiana, in Kentucky and Illinois. They had felt, as I felt, that however gifted his race had proven itself in music, in oratory, in several of the other arts, here was the first instance of an American negro who had evinced innate distinction in literature. In my criticism of his book I had alleged Dumas in France, and I had forgetfully failed to allege the far greater Pushkin in Russia; but these were both mulattoes, who might have been supposed to derive their qualities from white blood vastly more artistic than ours, and who were the creatures of an environment more favorable to their literary development. So far as I could remember, Paul Dunbar was the only man of pure African blood and of American civilization to feel the negro life aesthetically and express it lyrically. It seemed to me that this had come to its most modern consciousness in him, and that his brilliant and unique achievement was to have studied the American negro objectively, and to have represented him as he found him to be, with humor, with sympathy, and yet with what the reader must instinctively feel to be entire truthfulness. I said that a race which had come to this effect in any member of it, had attained civilization in him, and I permitted myself