Dunbar, the originator.

I once referred to accidental Dunbar scholar, understating the fact that I, like many African Americans of my generation, was born in the bed with Paul Laurence Dunbar, born in the bed, as they say, the way that some are born in the bed with gold, with Dunbar as a substantial part of my literary inheritance. My working class high school educated parents shared their love of and loyalty to Paul Laurence Dunbar's poetry and my mother recited his poems to me while I was literally in the cradle.

Dunbar's poetry, especially his dialect verse, was frequently performed from memory by other members of the community on numerous celebratory occasions, especially at Embry AME Church. Though my mother admonished me to give equal time to Dunbar's standard English verse, I took as my favorite the dialect poem "In the Morning," probably because it reminded me of mornings at 5508 Richmond Avenue. This early "hometraining" was later reinforced in graduate school by Professor Charles T. Davis's lectures on Dunbar and by his reading of some of Dunbar's classic poems. Yet I, like many others during the 1970s and '80s, passively accepted the fact that Dunbar was out of favor and that his poems were out of print.

As a young professor at William and Mary, I continued to lecture on Dunbar in my literature classes and each year I dutifully made copies of the poems for teaching purposes. But then one day while standing over the copier, I realized that I and my students deserved better, so I closed my tattered copy of The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar and began a project of reclamation. The result, as we now know, is The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, reviewed in American Literature as "the largest collection of Dunbar's poetry yet published ..." and "including some poems from earlier volumes that were omitted from the 1913 volume" as well as "poems published in periodicals but never collected, and some previously unpublished poems from the Paul Laurence Dunbar Collection of the Ohio Historical Society" (832). This labor of love produced a work distinct from the original, including an appendix of all known variants of Dunbar poems, a useable text for teaching and research, readily available at a reasonable price. So in that sense, there was nothing accidental; it was as if Charles stood on one side and Daddy on the other saying, "Well daughter, now what are you going to do?"

In recognizing the centenary of the 33-year span that might be fairly called "the Dunbar Era," we stand on the shoulders of literary giants Benjamin Brawley, J. Saunders Redding, Darwin Turner, Arna Bontemps, Addison Gayle, Jay Martin, Gossie Hudson, Peter Revell, and yes, even William Dean Howells, among others who have left their indelible if sometimes controversial, marks on Dunbar scholarship. And we say, "Thank you," to these who went before, because Mr. Dunbar, who understood and appreciated John Keats's concept of "negative capability," would want it that way. If, as Gene Jarrett so rightly observes, William Dean Howells ignored the local color-possibilities of Dunbar's "Humor and Dialect" verse, in favor of the myth of Dunbar's "pure blackness" and racial authenticity, and even if Howells, then known as the dean of American letters, wrote the review of Oak and Ivy without reading all of the poems included, we can still thank him for bringing Dunbar to the attention of a national audience. If Addison Gayle, the author of The Black Aesthetic and a leading theorist of the Black Arts Movement, was misguided in suggesting that Dunbar regarded his dialect poems as Minors and his standard English poems as Majors, we might also thank him for documenting the arc of Dunbar's career and contributing to critical audience development in the general audience biography, Oak and Ivy. No effort, including my own, has been perfect, but each has contributed to the golden legacy of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

His mother's beautiful singing of "Swing Low Sweet, Chariot," his father's stories of brave black Union soldiers, his reading of Italian and English sonnets, his ideas about romantic love and friendship, dialect works by Irwin Russell and others whose writings degraded blacks, the condescending criticism from Mr. Howells, his future wife's criticism of his vaudeville shows: these are some of the influences, both positive and negative, that shaped every aspect of Paul Laurence Dunbar's life and work. And within the scope of all of Dunbar's aspirations, his successes and failings, as well as our own, there underlies that romantic ideal, as Keats wrote in a letter to his brothers, of "Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" (193).

My continuing argument is that we must keep Dunbar at the center of our critical discourse about his work, and that we take care to remain capable of being in "uncertainty, Mystery and doubt," while accepting the possibility that Dunbar might often have been in uncertainty and doubt about his own work. As it turns out, he had many such doubts, which become most clear at the end of his poem "Prometheus":

   We have no singers like the ones whose note
   Gave challenge to the noblest warbler's song.
   We have no voice so mellow, sweet, and strong
   As that which broke from Shelley's golden throat.

   The measure of our songs is our desires:
   We tinkle where old poets used to storm.
   We lack their substance tho' we keep their form:
   We strum our banjo-strings and call them lyres. (11. 13-20)

We must read Paul Laurence Dunbar's work, then, and not only the poems, but also the fiction, the essays, and even the theatrical work ever more carefully, and we must attend to the difficult questions it raises throughout. What were the roles of his mother and father? What literary inheritance did he acquire from them in the home and how did they contribute to his "ear" for language and his love of storytelling? How important was his friendship with Wilbur and Orville Wright and how do their dreams of flight parallel Dunbar's own? What was the meaning of friendship in the poet's life, and what place did he assign to it? What impulses motivated him in his sometimes obsessive relationship with his wife, Alice Dunbar-Nelson? And for whom did he write the love poem, "Comrade?" which remained unpublished during his lifetime? Clearly this poem was written for a man, but what does that mean? Is it a homoerotic poem or was it, like some of his sonnets, representative of a kind of chaste or courtly love or perhaps an interpretation of romantic friendship? To what extent did Dunbar suffer from a Bloomian anxiety of influence as he sought to master the only literary models that he had in his quest to create something original and authentic? What are Dunbar's contributions to African American theatrical forms and to the American stage more generally? These questions may not have tidy answers, but they are worth asking.

Perhaps the best place to begin is at the beginning. Historically, critics of Dunbar's works, including the present generation, have undervalued the influence of both Joshua and Matilda Dunbar, not just as parents, but as heroes, artists and viable models. As Addison Gayle observes, Paul Laurence Dunbar's first attempts at writing poetry were in the language spoken by his parents. Dunbar used folk language and the black spiritual to meld the disparate elements of his inheritance and create authentic expressions of culture in both literature and performance. This latter aspect of the Dunbar tradition, performance, was extended after his death by The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, edited by Alice Dunbar-Nelson and described by Akasha Hull appropriately enough, as

"one place where the oral and the scribal meet" (xxxiii) Paul Laurence Dunbar told the stories of his parents' generation, both in standard English and the dialect which Gayle says Dunbar's parents did not speak (78). A stunning and perhaps the best known example is the poem "When Malindy Sings," in which the black speaker compares the "noise" of Miss Lucy to the tonal genius of Malindy:

   You ain't got de nachel o'gans
   Fu' to make de soun' come right,
   You ain't got de tu'ns an' twistin's
   Fu' to make it sweet an' light.
   Tell you one thing now, Miss Lucy,
   An' I'm tellin' you fu' true,
   When hit comes to raal right singin',
   'T ain't no easy thing to do.

   Easy 'nough fu' folks to hollah,
   Lookin' at de lines an" dots,
   When dey ain't no one kin sence it,
   An' de chune comes in, in spots;
   But fu' real melojous music,
   Dat jes' strikes yo' hea't and clings,
   Jes' you stan' an' listen wif me
   When Malindy sings. (11. 9-24)

As critics have noted, Malindy, is, of course, Matilda Dunbar, the person Dunbar was arguably closest to for most of his life. But because Dunbar wrote, "We wear the mask," I remain suspicious of Gayle's assertion that the Dunbars spoke only standard English. The portrait of Paul Dunbar and mother on the Wright State University website exemplifies this wearing of the mask; a dignified but private and a partially concealed self ("Paul Laurence and Matilda Dunbar). While the unwritten rules of pubic engagement and negotiation outside the home dictated the use of more formal language, centuries of oral play and practice do not die in a single generation. Like many African Americans today, the Dunbars may have been culturally fluent in multiple linguistic codes based in "Motherwit." Or "why should the world be overwise?" Being recognized as one of the custodians of Dunbar's legacy has put me "on point," in unexpected ways. One day in 2002 1 opened an email from Bud Cole, an 80-year-old man--a white man--living in Scottsdale, Arizona who had grown up as a boy living next door to Matilda Dunbar at 221 Summit Street in Dayton. Mr. Cole wrote:

   For a very long time I have been wondering what to do with a quilt
   that Matilda Dunbar gave to my mother in about 1927 or 28. We
   always referred to it as "Mother Dunbar's Quilt" and my memory
   tells me the quilt was made from scraps of his childhood shirts and
   her dresses. My memories of her, to this day, are very vivid. My
   kid sister and I frequently would go over to Matilda's and she
   would sit in a rocking chair holding us on her lap and sing
   lullabies and songs to us in a soft, sweet voice.

The quilt with its hexagonal pattern, and cleanly articulated and tattered carefully finished edges, is the work of a visual artist of fine sensibility. Among the other things that Mrs. Dunbar gave to Cole's mother were Christmas cards, photographs, and a copy of "When Malindy Sings." Here is an answer to Alice Walker's question, "What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great grandmothers' day?" (233). For Matilda Dunbar, it meant being a laundress, a songstress, quilt maker, and mother. She sang to Paul, taught him to wear the mask, and gave him his first lessons in aesthetics-and these aesthetics are reflected in the visual literacy of "Mother Dunbar's Quilt," formal, sophisticated and articulate.

After Matilda divorced Paul's father in 1876, the young poet reinforced his home training in masking and double vision with frequent visits to his father at his residence in the Dayton Soldiers Home.(1) We know something of Joshua Dunbar's experiences as a fugitive from his son's short story, "The Ingrate," where the hero tricks the master into teaching him to read and write so that he can forge his own pass to freedom. Although there is variance between the details of the experiences of the fictional and non-fictional Joshua Dunbar, we do know that Paul's father escaped to Canada and then returned to Ohio, where he joined the Massachusetts 55th Volunteer Infantry in the Spring of 1863.

The historical Joshua, the real man, found himself stationed at Folly Island, South Carolina, working as a laborer, building fortifications, and doing the heavy lifting that white soldiers refused to do, sometimes under enemy fire. He who had been enslaved under the Confederacy now found himself virtually enslaved by the Union, ridiculed and abused by men wearing the same blue uniform that he wore. After being injured in August, Joshua Dunbar received a medical discharge in October, and four months after that he played another trickster's move, reenlisting in the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry, a fighting unit.

Refusing to be a slave to either the North or the South, Joshua Dunbar served at a time when the mere sight of blacks in uniform enraged southern soldiers, who often murdered wounded black troops on the field. There were ample opportunities for heroism in Joshua Dunbar's military career. Around the time that he participated in the siege of Petersburg, a number of wounded black troops also fighting in Virginia were killed and buried in unmarked graves in what became known as "The Saltville Massacre." Wounded soldiers were even taken from their beds in a field hospital and executed.

Dunbar's understatement in "Emancipation" and "The Colored Soldiers" may well be a response to northern racism. "When Dey Listed Colored Soldiers" follows 'Lias into war through the eyes of his sweetheart, but begs the question of the manner of his death and burial. Like others of "Our Martyred Soldiers," 'Lias lies in an unmarked grave. As critics have observed, black soldiers in Dunbar's poems are almost always depicted as silent heroes who fought bravely and without question to solve the quarrels of northern and southern white men who took them for granted; yet these poems are also filled with strategic silences, a negotiation with an audience that in large part did not want to know too much. Like his mother, Dunbar wore the mask, and he wore it well; like his father, he played the trickster's part. Paul Laurence Dunbar honored and emulated his parents; at times formal and distant, at other times more relaxed, he sang their songs and told their stories. Their influence as artists, heroes and models, must not be underestimated.

Dunbar's poetry reflects more traditional artistic and literary influences as well. Even Langston Hughes referred to Dunbar as "the black Robert Burns," and there may be direct references to Burns in "Confirmation," "The Spelling Bee," and "In Summer."(2) Burns, like Dunbar, wrote dialect poems, songs, and ballads, and Dunbar, like Burns, "loved the dear old ballads best" ("Songs" 1.1), but unlike the Scottish bard, Dunbar rarely uses the standard ballad stanza.(3) In the entire Dunbar oeuvre of about 500 poems, he uses the more widely known abcb form of the quatrain fewer than 30 times. His poem "Confirmation" is a notable exception:

   He was a poet who wrote clever verses,
   And folks said he had fine poetical taste;
   But his father, a practical farmer, accused him
   Of letting the strength of his arm go to waste.

   He called on his sweetheart each Saturday evening,
   As pretty a maiden a man has ever faced,
   And there he confirmed the old man's accusation
   By letting the strength of his arm go to waist.

Both Burns and Dunbar use longer stanzas in their ballads, as appropriate to their love of storytelling. Yet when Dunbar does use the quatrain, he employs the rare abab much more often than Burns, varying the stress patterns.(4) In adopting the abcb ballad rhyme scheme most often used by Burns and most often eschewed by himself, does "Confirmation" reference Burns, whose father forced him to be a farmer? Does "Confirmation" intentionally confirm Burns's influence on the Black poet, adding yet another level of wordplay to "waste" and "waist"? Did Dunbar leave behind this abcb ballad rhyme scheme marker like a trail of bread crumbs for you and me, dear reader?

At the same time that he signifies on his literary inheritance, Dunbar remains set on attaining linguistic freedom. "The Colored Soldiers" and "A Border Ballad," both abcb, stretch to abcbdefe. "A Border Ballad," with its Scottish theme, again suggests the influence of Burns, especially as the lines "And the poorest and weakest are taking their chance / Along with the richest and the strongest" (ll. 3-4). However, this ballad by Dunbar differs from anything Bums wrote. "A Border Ballad" is in the more unusual abaabbab form. Although Dunbar sustains the typical ballad theme of love, he also departs from canonical form in a quest for original forms that reflect authentic black folk speech. In this departure, he becomes the originator of something entirely new.

Arguably, Dunbar was frustrated, both as a romantic poet and as a local color writer, and where some others saw him as a black Robert Bums, he may have seen himself as a black John Keats. Dunbar had good reason to identify with both Bums and Keats. As early as 1942, Charles Davis wrote that Dunbar's "primary literary conditioning in high school was one that gave importance to romantic voice" (130). And despite Dunbar's obvious affinity with Bums, Dunbar read Bums through the eyes of the Romantics. Bums was virtually a saint to Keats, Dunbar's favorite Romantic poet, and to others who made spiritual pilgrimages to his tomb.(5) Like John Keats, Dunbar was actively engaged in what Edward Hirsch has called "the quest for a more malleable sonnet form" (xxii).(6) And like Bums, he also wrote dialect poems, as well as songs and ballads. All three men came from humble origins, and all three loved their ladies with a passionate depth of expression, perhaps obsessively. Each received the barbs of critics, but Keats, like Dunbar, felt the "keener sting" of reviews of his poetry that at times plunged him into the depths of depression. Both Dunbar and Burns drank enough to damage their health, and Dunbar, like Keats, lived in a world where tuberculosis was rampant. And each died young after having lived with the knowledge that death was near. So I try to complicate my earlier readings of Dunbar's poetry by looking more closely at the man and thinking about how he might have viewed himself.

Marcellus Blount's more recent work on race and gender in the sonnet reinforces the importance of Romantic poets as models for Dunbar and his work.(7) Blount writes: "The pursuit of form in the Afro-American sonnet has measured the participation of black poets in Euro-American cultural traditions while testing the individual poet's claim to originality and authenticity. For black poets, the sonnet has served as a zone of entrapment and liberation, mediation and self-possession." Citing the poems "Douglass," "Booker T. Washington," and "Robert Gould Shaw," Blount points out Dunbar's recognition of "the viability of the sonnet as a mode of personal and racial subjectivity," and his participation in "the fight for black self-determination by writing the first sonnets on African American men" (228-31). "Booker T. Washington" illustrates Dunbar's struggle for literary self-determination and linguistic mastery. Like many African American sermons and spirituals, it is also reminiscent of epic poetry from West African oral tradition, and whether there is a direct influence or not, "Booker T. Washington" demonstrates Dunbar's quest for thematic liberation from the traditional European topics of the sonnet.

This tour de force is regular in meter, consistent with the stalwart strength, undeterrable forward momentum, and stateliness that forms Dunbar's characterization of Washington. The subject matter harkens back to Petrarch's sonnets to Laura and Dante's sonnets to Beatrice. Like these European predecessors, Dunbar's sonnet represents a kind of chaste, Platonic, or courtly love based on inspiration from a distance--not from intimate or erotic love. Like an English sonnet, "Booker T. Washington" is written in iambic pentameter, but it is comprised by an octave and a sestet, with a volta at their hinge, unlike the Shakespearean sonnet, where the turn occurs before the closing couplet. Celebrating Washington's heroic black manliness, Dunbar soars free of potential linguistic entrapment:

Booker T. Washington

   The word is writ that he who runs may
   read.
   What is the passing breath of earthly fame?
   But to snatch glory from the hands of
   blame--
   That is to be, to live, to strive indeed.
   A poor Virginia cabin gave the seed,
   And from its dark and lonely door there
   came
   A peer of princes in the world's acclaim,
   A master spirit for the nation's need.
   Strong, silent, purposeful, beyond his kind,
   The mark of rugged force on brow and
   lip,
   Straight on he goes, nor turns to look behind
   Where hot the hounds come baying at
   his hip;
   With one idea foremost in his mind;
   Like the keen prow of some on-forging
   ship.

"Booker T. Washington" opens with "The word is writ that he who runs may read," a strong statement as is characteristic of the Petrarchan form, and the octave is divided into quatrains, as is also common in the Italian sonnet. The first quatrain is philosophical and focuses on what constitutes a meaningful life and what entitles one to fame, the second specifies Washington's roots and shows him as a Christ-like presence in the world. The meter of the poem breaks twice only and in only two significant places: "Strong, silent, purposeful beyond his kind," where we get the ten syllables scan not as iambic but rather as spondaic for emphasis. The second metrical break occurs at the penultimate line, "With one idea foremost in his mind," which sets readers up by stopping us in our tracks before the closing line, "Like the keen prow of some on-going ship," which not only breaks the meter but is brief--again, for emphasis--the only line in the poem with nine syllables. After the volta, "Strong, silent, purposeful, beyond his kind," the poem focuses on Washington's physical presence and his spirit of determination. The third quatrain gives the Italian sonnet its final cognitive extension, like the English form. Still, the mini-turn also echoes the Shakespearean form, as the closing couplet is set off from the third quatrain and the rest of the poem. The final line refers to both Washington's idea and echoes his physiognomy by referring once more to his brow and the tenth line, and one could argue that the closing couplet

   With one idea foremost in his mind;
   Like the keen prow of some on-forging
   ship

forms a conceptually self-contained unit, and conducts a volta in symbolic miniature; this reading would link the poem to the Shakespearean sonnet, even though the last two lines do not form a rhymed couplet, another mark of Dunbar's mastery of form, or instead perhaps, a Bloomian "anxiety of influence."(8)

Gayle quotes Dunbar as having uttered to an unnamed visitor from his sick bed, "I am lying fallow. I believe my soul has become greatly impoverished, and it will take a good many rains and snows to put anything into it worth coming out in blossom. But my greatest help will be the knowledge that my friends keep in touch with me, and now and then a line like an electric spark flashes from one to the other and I am new again" (154). (9) This statement by Dunbar echoes the romantic principles of Keats's notion of negative capability, as well as Dunbar's romantic letters to his wife, Alice, written in a style similar to those written by Keats to his fiancee, Fanny Brawne. In summary, we can complicate our understanding of Dunbar's work in productive ways by throwing off some parts of our critical inheritance, especially, as Gene Jarrett's work suggests, Howells's preoccupation with Dunbar's racial purity and the resulting "dictum," along with other dismissive myths and mis-readings. (10) There is value in reading Dunbar as both a Romantic poet and a local color writer, and many other ways to put Dunbar at the center, both thematically and formally. For example, by reading more closely, by examining his linguistic inheritance more carefully, by discussing his notions of romantic love and friendship, by drawing near, we can generate the capability, the spark to make Dunbar new again.

Should we not celebrate Dunbar, not only on the centennial of his death but each and every year? Scots around the world celebrate "Rabbie Burns Day" on January 25 of each year with a ritual supper that includes haggis, bagpipes, readings of Burns's work the singing of "Auld Lang Syne," and of course, Scotch whisky--at least 872 Burns celebrations throughout the world; 676 in Scotland, attended by as many as a thousand people each, and as many as 3,000 in attendance in New York City alone ("The Supper"). Should we not celebrate Dunbar with poetry slams and dandelion wine, wherever we multicultured versifiers may find ourselves on June 27, "Paul Laurence Dunbar Day"? And what about a Paul Laurence Dunbar Society and Journal, both for the advancing of Dunbar scholarship and also to stimulate and create audiences for black and experimental poetry in the twenty-first century? (11) We need "Dunbar Academies" where younger poets learn to read Dunbar's verse and to feel with their bodies from the inside out the connections between the old and the new. (12)

Notes

(1.) The Dayton Soldier's Home figures prominently as a "site of memory" for Dunbar, marking several important breaks or transitions. Not only did it become Joshua Dunbar's residence, but Joshua died there on August 16, 1885, and the Soldier's Home cemetery is his final resting place. The Dayton Soldier's Home marked another sad moment in the poet's life: sometime during the winter of 1885-1886, Wilbur Wright, one of Dunbar's closest friends, was hit in the mouth with a hockey puck while skating on an artificial lake at the Dayton Soldier's Home. It is not known whether or not the poet was present when the accident occurred. In any case, afterwards, the injury became infected, and Wilbur's heart was damaged, leaving him severely depressed and homebound. During this time, Wilbur took care of his mother, Susan, who was dying from tuberculosis, which was then rampant in Dayton. This care was dangerous occupation, a labor of love, and another source of depression for Wilbur. According to playwright Arthur Giron, author of Flight, a play about the Wright brothers, Dunbar was a frequent visitor to the home of Bishop Milton and Susan Wright and a close companion to Wilbur during this four-year period. It is not known when Dunbar contracted tuberculosis. See Giron.

(2.) Dunbar was familiar with at least one of Burns's more famous works, "Tam O' Shanter", which he references in line 24 of his lengthy and humorous "The Spellin'-Bee": "An' scurried to the zero mark ez quick ez Tam O' Shanter". Dunbar makes no overt mention of Burns, but there are several poems that could easily be said to describe Burns. For example, "In Summer":

   I envy the farmer's boy
   Who sings as he follows the plough;...

   ... He sings to the dewy morn,
   No thought of another's ear;
   But the song he sings is a chant for kings
   And the whole wide world to hear. (11.9-10, 13-16).

(3.) See "The Lesson," "Confirmation," "The Haunted Oak," "The Paradox," "in Summer," "Love's Castle," "On a Clean Book," "In the Tents of Akbar," "Life's Tragedy," "The Forest Greeting," "The Lily of the Valley," "Forever," "Twilight," "A Golden Day," "Compensation," "Yesterday and Tomorrow," "The Chase," "After Many Days," "Evening," "Love's Pictures," "An Old Memory," "Worn Out," "Lager Beer," "A Crumb, a Crumb, and a Little Seed," "The Concert," "To Mary Church Terrell," and his original "Sympathy" (his second "Sympathy" takes on the more unusual abaabcc.).

(4.) See "A Prayer," "The Seedling," "Unexpressed," "Merry Autumn," "Goodnight," "The Deserted Plantation," "Love's Apotheosis," "Over the Hills," "A Hymn," "The Barrier," "Dreams," "Theology," "Resignation," "Love's Humility," "Precedent," "Thou Art my Lute," "The Phantom Kiss," "Communion," "Distinction," "Confessional," "The Warriors Prayer," "Then and Now," "Song" no. 2, "The Wraith," "Silence," "A Spiritual," "The Poor'-although the middle stanza differs, "Morning Song of Love," "The Murdered Lover," "On the Dedication of Dorothy Hall," "To a Dead Friend," "The Fount of Tears," "Winter-Song" with a varied chorus, "Parted"-both one and two, "Appreciation," "Love's Draft," "A Musical," "Twel De Night Is Pas,' ""Kidnapped," "The Change," "The Death of the First Born," "Night," "The Masters," "When Winter Darkening All Around," "From the Porch at Runnymede," "A Thanksgiving Poem," "Emancipation," "Common Things," "To Alice Dunbar," "To a Poet and a Lady," "Song" ("De bee hit sip some honey" [1.1]), and "Content"-"Day" has only two stanzas, one in abcb and the other abab; whereas "Justice has the same pattern for the first stanza, but aabb for the second. "Accountability" uses the quatrain but with an aabb rhyme scheme (a scheme that he uses frequently), but it is more unusual in that the lines have a high number of iambic feet.

(5.) See Hughes.

(6.) Hirsch writes about Keats's experimentation with hybrid sonnet forms in his introduction to The 64 Sonnets.

(7.) See Blount's "Caged Birds" and "Slavery Remembered."

(8.) Many thanks to Laud Ramey for her reading and analysis of "Booker T. Washington" and her extended discussions of this poem with me. This exchange represents a continuation of our long literary friendship.

(9.) Paul Laurence Dunbar to an unnamed vistor on 30 Dec. 1905. See also Hirsch and Bromwich.

(10.) See Jarrett's "Minstrel Realism" and "Race, Realism." See also Jarrett in this issue (289-94).

(11.) On May 25, 2007, shortly after this special issue went into production, the author co-convened the founding meeting of the Paul Laurence Dunbar Society in Boston, Massachusetts at the annual meeting of the American Literature Association.

(12.) An example of such an "academy" is "The Dunbar Project," Lorna C. Hill, Director, of the Ujima Company in Buffalo, New York. According to Hill,

   The inspiration for The Dunbar Project and Ujima's emphasis on
   theatre training for children and teens begins with... And Bid Him
   Sing, a play written by Lorna C. Hill. Based on the poetry of Paul
   Laurence Dunbar, and set in 1890 to 1900, it premiered in 1980 and
   has evolved significantly over the past 21 years. Its ten
   performances between 1990 and the present establish it as Buffalo's
   only African American theatrical tradition. The number of
   participating young people, ranging in age from three to 18, has
   multiplied from five student actors in 1990 to over 30 student
   actors and technicians in 2003. ("Dunbar Project")

In 2006, choreographer Dianne Mclntyre premiered her "Lyric Fire" with the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company; though not specifically geared to youth or an ongoing project, such projects reach wide audiences and help to preserve the Dunbar legacy.

Works Cited

Blount, Marcellus. "Caged Birds: Race and Gender in the Sonnet." Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism. New York: Routledge, 1990.

--. "Slavery Remembered: Dunbar and the African American Elegy." African American Review41 (2007): 239-46.

Bromwich, David. Introduction. The Poems. By John Keats. New York: Everyman's Library, 1999. xixxx.

Cole, Berton "Bud." Email to the author. 18 Dec. 2002.

Davis, Charles T. Black is the Color of the Cosmos: Essays on Black Literature and Culture, 19421981. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Garland P, 1982.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence. "The Ingrate." 1899. Dunbar, Strength 87-103.

--. "Songs." Oak and Ivy. Dayton, OH: Press of United Brethren, 1893.

--. The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1900.

"The Dunbar Project." Ujima Company, Inc. 13 Sept. 2005. 25 Sept. 2007. <http://uiimatheatre.org/pages/Dunbar/Dunbar.html>.

Gayle, Addison, Jr. Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.

Giron, Arthur. Interview with the author. 15 Jan. 2005.

Hirsch, Edward. Introduction. "Keats at Sonnets." The 64 Sonnets. By John Keats. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2004. ix-xxiii.

Hughes, Langston. "Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Robert Burns of Negro Poetry." Famous American Negroes. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975.82-90.

Hull, Akasha Gloria. Introduction. The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer: The Poet and His Song. 1920. Ed. Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. i-xxxiii.

Jarrett, Gene." 'Entirely Black Verse From Him Would Succeed': Minstrel Realism and William Dean Howells." American Literature 59.4 (1987): 494-525.

--. "'We Must Write Like the White Men': Race, Realism, and Dunbar's Anomalous First Novel." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 37.3 (Summer 2004): 303-25.

Keats, John. Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 21 Dec. 1817. The Letters of John Keats, 18141821. Vol. 1. Ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958. 193.

"Paul Laurence and Matilda Dunbar." c. 1890-1900. Paul Laurence Dunbar Digital Collection. 24 Sept. 2007. <http://www.libraries.wright.edu/ special/dunbar/qallery/dunbar_photos.html>.

Rev. of The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited and with an introduction by Joanne M. Braxton. American Literature 65.4 (December 1993): 832. "The Supper." Robert Bums Tribute. January 2000.25 Sept. 2007. <http://www.rabbieburns.com/thesupper/index.cfm>.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. 1967. New York: Harcourt, 1983.

Joanne M. Braxton, editor of The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1993), is Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings Professor of English and the Humanities at the College of William and Mary. Her writings include Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition (1989) and Sometimes I Think of Maryland (1977), a collection of poetry. Braxton is currently at work on A Dream of Flight: The Literary Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar.