The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar Book

THE COMPLETE POEMS OF PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR WlTH THE INTRODUCTION TO LYRICS OF LOWLY LIFE BY W. D. HOWELLS NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1913 DEDICATIONS LYRICS OF LOWLY LIFE TO MY MOTHER . . LYRICS OF THE HEAR THSIDE TO ALICE LYRICS OF LOVE AND LAUGHTER TO MISS CATHERINE IMPEY LYRICS OF SUNSHINE AND SHAD0 TV TO MRS. FRANK CONOVER WITH THANKS FOR HER LONG BELIEF INTRODUCTION TO LYRICS OF LOWLY LIFE I THINK I should scarcely trouble the reader with a spcciaI appeal in behalf of this book, if it had not specially appeaIed to me for reasons apart from the authors race, origin, and condition. The world is too old now, and I find myself too much of its mood, to care fox the work of a poet because he is black, because his father and mother were slaves, becaise he was, before and after he began to write poems, an elevator-boy. These facts wouId certainIy attract me to him as a man, if I knew him to have a Iiterary 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 itsclf. It seems to me that this was my experience with the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar vhen I found it in another form, and in justice to him I cannot wish that it shouId be otherwise with his readers here. StiII, it will legitimately interest those who like to know the causes, or, if these may not be known, the sources, of things, to Iearn that the father and mother of the first poet of his race in our Ianguage were blood. The father escaped from slavery in Kentucky to freedom in Canada, while there was stiII no hope of freedom othenvisc 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 chiIdren of the poor. He has told me that his father picked up the trade of a plasterer, and when he had taught himseIf to read, loved chiefly to read history. The boys mother shared his passion for literature, with a speciaI love of poetry, and after the father died she struggled on in more than the poverty she had shared with him. She couId vaIue the facuIty 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 seved cities of the adjoining States, there came letters in cordiaI appreciation of the crit- negroes without admixture of white ical recognition which it was my pleasure no less than my duty to vastly more artistic than ours, and offer Paul Dunbars work in an- who were the creatures oi an en- other place. It seemed to me a vironment more favorable to their happy omen for him that so many literary development. So far as peopIe who had known him, or I could remember, Paul Dunbar known of him, were glad of a was the onIy man of pure African strangers good word and it was blood and of American civiliza- gratifying to see that at home he tion to feel the negro Iife asthetic- was esteemed for the things he had ally and express it lyrically. It done rather than because as the seemed to me that this bad come son of negm slaves he had done to its most modern consciousness them. If a prophet is often with- in him, and that his briIliant and out honor in his own country, it unique achievement was to have sureIy is nothing against him studied the American negro ob- when he has it. In this case it de- jectively, and to have represented prived me of the glory of a dis- him as he found him to be, with coverer but that is sometimes a humor, with sympathy, and yet barren joy, and I am always will- with what the reader must instinc- ing to forego it. tivtly feel to be entire txuthfuI- What struck me in reading Mr. ness...