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• 1 2022-01-11T09:33:39-05:00 Paul Laurence Dunbar: Author Page 14 plain 2023-07-01T07:25:14-04:00 Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was perhaps the most influential African American poet from the turn of the century period. He was extremely prolific, publishing twelve collections of original poetry in an all-too-brief span of time. Dunbar was born and raised in Ohio (and many of his papers are held at Wright State University); he also lived in Washington, DC, where he briefly attended Howard University. In 1900, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and moved with his wife, Alice Dunbar Nelson (born Alice Ruth Moore) to Colorado. Dunbar finally returned to Dayton, Ohio, where he passed away due to tuberculosis at the age of 33. 
  
  Many subsequent poets remarked on the huge impact his writing had on them, including especially James Weldon Johnson, James D. Corrothers, and William Stanley Braithwaite. Even as they praised Dunbar, several of these critics nevertheless criticized his use of "dialect poetry" (written African American Vernacular English [AAVE]). Braithwaite, writing in The Crisis in 1919 [and reprinted in 1925], indicated that he felt Dunbar's use of AAVE was archaic; Johnson, writing in 1922, also criticized it. Countee Cullen, in Colors, published a poem called "For Paul Laurence Dunbar" that seemed to suggest Dunbar's life and work had been a failure. By contrast, however, James D. Corrothers published a Dunbar tribute poem that affirmed and celebrated the poet's contribution to African American culture.
  
  While Dunbar has undeniably been a controversial figure, recent critics such as Geoffrey Jacques have argued that Dunbar himself was aware of the complexity of his position, as a popular poet who frequently performed before large audiences, both Black and white. For example, poems like "We Wear the Mask" highlight his self-consciousness with respect to the performance of Blackness in the Jim Crow era: 
   

  WE WEAR THE MASK

  We wear the mask that grins and lies,
  It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
  This debt we pay to human guile;
  With torn and bleeding hearts we smile
  And mouth with myriad subtleties,

  Why should the world be over-wise.
  In counting all our tears and sighs?
  Nay, let them only see us, while
  We wear the mask.

  We smile, but oh great Christ, our cries
  To thee from tortured souls arise.
  We sing, but oh the clay is vile
  Beneath our feet, and long the mile,
  But let the world dream otherwise,
  We wear the mask!

  
  Another poem that points to this self-consciousness might be "The Poet" 

  THE POET

  He sang of life, serenely sweet,
  With, now and then, a deeper note.
  From some high peak, nigh yet remote,
  He voiced the world's absorbing beat.

  He sang of love when earth was young,
  And Love, itself, was in his lays.
  But ah, the world, it turned to praise
  A jingle in a broken tongue.

  Below I will post the full text of as many of Dunbar's collections as possible. Down the road, I hope to assemble a curated collection of highlights from Dunbar's works, as well as a short collection of tribute poems written by other poets. 
  
   
• 1 2022-07-15T15:10:55-04:00 Black Poetry Before the Harlem Renaissance: Overview and Timeline 10 plain 2023-05-16T21:30:01-04:00 This site aims to make available poetry by African American poets from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From that period, the movement that is best known today is the Harlem Renaissance, where a group of authors, editors, and publishers helped create a literary sensation. Anthology editors, magazine editors, and mainstream publishers all contributed to the rising cultural capital of Black poets in the 1920s. 
  
  However, well before the 1920s the field of African American poetry was already very vibrant. There are three major threads we will briefly outline here: 1) the marked influence of Paul Laurence Dunbar beginning in the 1890s; 2) the influence of Colored American Magazine in the early 1900s; and 3) the advent of poetry published in The Crisis, beginning in 1910. The goal of this page is to provide readers with a few starting points for poetry from this period that point to the extensive array of resources collected at this site. 
  
  1. Paul Laurence Dunbar
  
  For the purposes of this site, the most salient starting point might be the writing of Paul Laurence Dunbar, a poet who emerged in the 1890s, and who became highly influential, both for other African American writers, and for mainstream / white audiences. His career was brief but extremely bright; Dunbar published twelve collections of original poetry in a career that lasted less than fifteen years. 
  
  Dunbar's most influential poem, "We Wear the Mask" (1895) thematizes the ambivalence he might have felt as a performer who had achieved significant success and name-recognition among white audiences while remaining subject to institutional racism. At the same time, Dunbar appears to have been widely beloved by Black readers as well as contemporary Black poets; this site has a small collection of tribute poems written by Black poets to Dunbar attesting to their admiration for him. 
  
  Dunbar was often derided as a purveyor of "dialect verse." And indeed, one of the marks of a generational shift William Stanley Braithwaite noted in 1919 was the sense that the younger generation -- the generation that would become the core of the Harlem Renaissance -- was moving away from its reliance on dialect, and instead exploring forms of race-conscious writing that operated quite differently. 
  
  
  2. Colored American Magazine and The Voice of the Negro
  
  Colored American Magazine was published between 1900-1909, and published a considerable amount of poetry by writers like William Stanley Braithwaite, James D. Corrothers, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Timothy Thomas Fortune. There is an excellent digital archive of Colored American Magazine here, and we have not attempted to duplicate the materials found there on this site. The specific index of contributors is here.  
  
  The Voice of the Negro was a magazine of news and opinion published in Atlanta between 1904 and 1907. It covered issues related to African American civil rights, as well as poetry by writers like James D. Corrothers, Benjamin Griffith Brawley, and others. In many ways, it appears as a predecessor and model for The Crisis. 
  
  
  3. The advent of poetry in The Crisis 
  
  The Crisis began publication as the official monthly magazine for the newly-formed NAACP in 1910 under the editorship of W.E. B. Du Bois. By 1911, it was publishing poetry regularly, with 1 or more poem appearing in every issue. Under Du Bois, the decision process does not appear to have been highly selective, and poems of very different styles and voices were published. Writers like Georgia Douglas Johnson, Carrie Williams Clifford, Leslie Pinckney Hill, and Lucian B. Watkins were regular contributors. With a circulation of 100,000 at its peak, the magazine proved to be an extremely effective way for emerging writers to find an audience. 
  
  In 1919, Jessie Fauset took over as literary editor at The Crisis, and helped to usher in a new generation of contributors, including several writers who would be mainstays of the Harlem Renaissance. See our complete collection of poetry published in The Crisis here. 
  
  By the late 1910s and early 1920s, other magazines were also emerging. The UNIA's Negro World had a popular "Poetry for the People" section between 1919-1921, and Opportunity: a Journal of Negro Life emerged in 1923. Moreover, by the early 1920s it was becoming more common for Black writers like Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes to publish their poetry in mainstream magazines like Bookman and Seven Arts. 
  
  
  Timeline of African American Poetry Before the Harlem Renaissance (1870-1920)
  
  1870-1900
  
  1873: Adah Isaacs Menken*, Infelicia (Editor's note: There is some debate about the ancestry of Adah Isaacs Menken. Her parents may have been mixed-race Louisiana creoles. See her Wikipedia entry)
  1877: Alberry A Whitman, Not a Man, Yet a Man
  1890: Josephine Heard, Morning Glories
  1893: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Oak and Ivy (self-published in Ohio)
  1895: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Majors and Minors. Reviewed by William Dean Howells, who praises his "dialect verse" 
  1895, Eloise A Bibb, Poems
  1895: George Marion McClellan, Poems
  1895: Daniel Webster Davis, Idle Moments: Containing Emancipation and Other Poems
  1896: Frances E.W. Harper, Poems
  1896: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life (preface by William Dean Howells)
  1897: Mary Weston Fordham, Magnolia Leaves (Preface by Booker T. Washington)
  1899: Olivia Ward Bush-Banks, Original Poems (1899)
  
  1900-1910
  
  1900: Colored American Magazine begins publication
  1902: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Love and Laughter
  1904: The Voice of the Negro begins publication in Atlanta.
  1904: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of the Hearthside
  1904: Paul Laurence Dunbar, "Lyrics of the Hearthside" 
  1904: William Stanley Braithwaite, "Lyrics of Love and Life" 
  1905: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow
  1905: Benjamin Griffith Brawley, "The Problem And Other Poems" 
  1905: Timothy Thomas Fortune, "Dreams of Life: Miscellaneous Poems" 
  1906: Paul Laurence Dunbar dies
  1907: Lucian B. Watkins, Voices of Solitude 
  1908: William Stanley Braithwaite, House of Falling Leaves
  1908: Clara Ann Thompson, Songs from the Wayside 
  1908: Charles Frederick White, Plea of the Negro Soldier: and a Hundred Other Poems
  1909: Founding of the NAACP
  1909: Walter Everette Hawkins, "Chords and Discords"
  1910: Maggie Pogue Johnson, "Virginia Dreams" 
  1910: H. Cordelia Ray, "Poems" 
  1910: The Crisis begins publication
  
  
  1911-1921
  
  1913: Fenton Johnson, "A Little Dreaming" 
  1914: Olivia Ward Bush-Banks, "Driftwood" 
  1915: Fenton Johnson, "Visions of the Dusk" 
  1916: Fenton Johnson, "Songs of the Soil" 
  1917: James Weldon Johnson, Fifty Years and other Poems
  1918: Georgia Douglas Johnson, "The Heart of a Woman" (with a preface by William Stanley Braithwaite)
  1918: Waverley Turner Carmichael, "From the Heart of a Folk" 
  1919: Claude McKay publishes several poems in The Liberator, including "If We Must Die"
  1920: Sarah Lee Brown Fleming, "Clouds and Sunshine" 
  1920: Claude McKay, Spring in New Hampshire (published in the UK)
  1921 Leslie Pinckney Hill, "Wings of Oppression"