Lyrics of Lowly Life Book

This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control. Because this work is culturally important, we have made it available as a part of our commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the world's literature.

Sacred Life

It is both poignant and ironic that Lyrics of Lowly Life, Paul Laurence Dunbar's third volume of poems and the one to gain him a national reputation, should also contain the two poems that would most clearly represent him and reflect the artistic conflict that would torment him throughout his life.

The conflict that tormented Dunbar, one that remained unresolved throughout his short life (he died at age thirty-three), involved his reputation as a poet: While he longed to be taken seriously and to be acknowledged for his poems in standard English, the racial proscription of the country would allow him place only for his mastery of "Negro dialect." A good deal of nineteenth-century white America's love of his dialect poetry was based on his benign images of laughing "darkies" and "coons" eatin' and fishin' and dancin' on the plantation.

But in his standard poems, Dunbar showed a more philosophic bent, musing in the Romantic tradition about the natural world and life itself. And while his dialect poems seem to indicate a counterrevolutionary Tom, his standard poems reveal a man with an evolved racial consciousness that, on rare occasions, borders on militance. Poems such as "We Wear the Mask" and "Frederick Douglass" remain sublime testimonies to the difficulties of black life in America. Fortunately, in the century since Dunbar's death, his reputation has come to rightly rest with these and others of his challenging and lyrical standard English poems.