Reviews for The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar

The average rating for The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-06-03 00:00:00 Jamie Jonasson Major Field Prep: 22/133 This 1994 collected edition of Dunbar's poetry reprints the 1913 Completed Works and adds an addition 60 or so poems that were not included in that posthumous volume. Dunbar's poetry takes on a wide variety of styles, genres, and forms and the most distinct difference in groupings is between his "dialect" phonetic language representation poetry and the standard English poetry. Early in his career Dunbar dubbed these his "minor" and "major" poems, a distinction that begins to justify some of the criticism of his dialect poetry for rearticulating racist stereotypes of the plantation narrative genre. Braxton's introduction claims that Dunbar was "rightly uncomfortable" with praise for his dialect poetry by white critics "because he knew that they were deaf to his voice of protest and that they misread his work and praised it for the wrong reasons" (xxx). Close attention to the scope of poetry discredits this particular criticism of Dunbar's intention, and claims of intentional pandering have less to do with the work and more to do with the artist. Most notable poems: "We Wear the Mask", "The Haunted Oak", "Sympathy", "Slow Through the Dark", "The Old Cabin". Other poems of interest: "To the South on its New Slavery", "Little Brown Baby", "A Negro Love Song", "Nature and Art", "The Colored Soldiers", "The Lover and the Moon"

Review # 2 was written on 2013-01-10 00:00:00 Kenneth Van Buren Wonderful and varied poetry! A pleasure to be introduced in a book club to an author that apparently most African-Americans know and I had not heard of. "He achieved recognition as America's first professional black literary man. The author of six volumes of poetry...as well as of novels, librettos, songs and essays, Dunbar was known nationally at the turn of the century and accepted as a writer among both blacks and whites. He is remembered today chiefly as a poet." "Dubar will speak of the good ole days, then say "We Wear the Mask." In his words, he had an "all absorbing desire to be a worthy singer of the songs of God and nature. To be able to interpret my own people through song and story, and to prove to the many that after all we are more human than African." "I know why the caged bird sings" is a line from one of his poems.