By the way, my mother has posted the poem you requested her to post, on the Mother’s Day post.

cheers,
Annie

Annie,

It’s too late. The camel of Modernism is in the tent. As Allen Tate said, “The critic who tells us that he understands Dryden but makes nothing of Hopkins or Yeats is telling us that he doesn’t understand Dryden.” The field has been overrun, not partially, but completely by Modernism, so that you cannot praise Dunbar without first praising Ammons. If you don’t show you understand Ammons, you cannot understand Dunbar. Since those who are sensitive enough to enjoy the music of Dunbar are not the types to even pretend to like Ammons, Dunbar gets no “real” champions who pass the Allen Tate test, and thus Dunbar’s obscurity is guaranteed.

Thomas

As for Dunbar-Nelson, I know just a few of her poems, the ones in the poetry anthologies, but enough to really want more. Do you know if there is any kind of edition of her poetry in print? A quick online search makes it look as if there is nothing but an edition of her diary done by the great Gloria Hull. If it is sad to think of the fate of Paul Dunbar’s poetic reputation, to think of the fate of Alice’s is so much worse that it is hard to even begin . . . yet of course we need to!

Thomas, there’s this jingle stereotyping again–it is really in the wind now, isn’t it, and feels to me, more and more, like cutting off the nose to spite the face, particularly in the marginalized state poetry is in now.

Thanks so much for bringing attention to Dunbar. He’s an amazing poet, and the story of how his legacy stayed strong in the African American community is equally amazing. If you ask many African Americans over the age of 50 to recite a poem, it is quite likely their go-to poet will be Dunbar. There was a time many a segregated city named their black school after Dunbar. In fact, in Lynchburg, Virginia, you can still find Paul L. Dunbar Middle School For Innovation, named in tribute to the town’s former all-black high school. From 1924-1944 (when the Lynchburg library would not admit blacks) the poet Anne Spencer served as the librarian at Dunbar High Shool, making sure the black students of that city had access to quality literature and poetry. You’re right, Anne, it’s a shame Dunbar couldn’t have lived to see the legacy he left.

By the way, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, who you mention in passing, is another poet worth exploring more. Her poems are full of surprises that continue to draw me back for more.

–Camille

William Dean Howells declared that the dialect poems were his real strength and said there was nothing “especially notable” in his standard verse “except for the Negro face of the author.”

Dunbar, like many Blacks, Women, Irish, Catholics, Indians, etc belonged to the Jingle School.

William Dean Howells, editor of “The Atlantic,” and a Realist, belonged to that White, Puritan, Anglo-American Male tribe in which the nation of Letters was ruled not by poems, but by men.

Howells, who is seen in the above quote ‘putting Dunbar in his place,’ was the sole witness of Emerson’s ill-mannered ‘jingle man’ remark against Poe. (This is sort of like a fiddler calling Mozart a ‘jingle man.’)

Emerson attacked the Jingle School in his essay ‘The Poet,’ insisting that poetry was an ‘argument.’ By Emerson’s logic, if poetry is ‘an argument,’ then we must ask, ‘what is an argument?’ Replies the Emersonian logic, ‘why it is a poem, of course!’

The most respected American Man of Letters (and basher of Poe & the Jingle School) is best known for a proposition that doesn’t pass the test of school-boy logic.

But we cannot question the Great Puritan Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The minor, trivial, Jingle School upstarts must remember: We live in an (Atlantic, Puritan) nation not of laws, not of poems, not of jingles, but of MEN.

Thomas

Terreson

Dunbar’s experimenting in dialects other than African-American fits in with the datum that he was not only a poet, but also a songwriter and writer of musicals. Writers of light verse and song lyrics frequently crossed over from one to the other in that period (from W. S. Gilbert to Ogden Nash); and, as “Under the Bamboo Tree” exemplifies (discussed recently on another thread), dialect songs have been a staple of pop music since Stephen Foster. Irving Berlin’s first song was in Italian-American dialect; he wrote a lot in Yiddish-American dialect and other dialects too. Frank Zappa’s “Valley Girls” is a dialect song. Dunbar’s chagrin at feeling pushed into writing in dialect may be contrasted with the apotheosis of hip hop — African-American dialect verse winning the marketplace and a substantial portion of the critical acclaim.

Thanks for the post, Annie. You urged me to pick up an anthology of African-American poetry, where I found this, by Anne Spencer (1882-1975), titled, “Dunbar”:

Ah, how poets sing and die!
Make one song and Heaven takes it;
Have one heart and Beauty breaks it;
Chatterton, Shelley, Keats and I –
Ah, how poets sing and die!

This, coupled with Bradley Paul’s mention of “historically black”, makes me think of this:

Amazing Grace – Wintley Phipps
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfGytXRpfho

-o-

One of the historically black high schools in my hometown of Baltimore is Paul Laurence Dunbar High School; their teams are named the “Poets.” It’s always a little stirring to see kids in town walking around in the t-shirts that say “Poet Pride.”