Lyrics of a Lowly Life ANNOTATION
The son of an escaped slave, Dunbar published 22 boods of poetry and fiction before his death of tuberculosis at the age of 34.
FROM THE CRITICS
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.
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